I've seen a lot of sentiment around Lemmy that AI is "useless". I think this tends to stem from the fact that AI has not delivered on, well, anything the capitalists that push it have promised it would. That is to say, it has failed to meaningfully replace workers with a less expensive solution - AI that actually attempts to replace people's jobs are incredibly expensive (and environmentally irresponsible) and they simply lie and say it's not. It's subsidized by that sweet sweet VC capital so they can keep the lie up. And I say attempt because AI is truly horrible at actually replacing people. It's going to make mistakes and while everybody's been trying real hard to make it less wrong, it's just never gonna be "smart" enough to not have a human reviewing its' behavior. Then you've got AI being shoehorned into every little thing that really, REALLY doesn't need it. I'd say that AI is useless.
But AIs have been very useful to me. For one thing, they're much better at googling than I am. They save me time by summarizing articles to just give me the broad strokes, and I can decide whether I want to go into the details from there. They're also good idea generators - I've used them in creative writing just to explore things like "how might this story go?" or "what are interesting ways to describe this?". I never really use what comes out of them verbatim - whether image or text - but it's a good way to explore and seeing things expressed in ways you never would've thought of (and also the juxtaposition of seeing it next to very obvious expressions) tends to push your mind into new directions.
Lastly, I don't know if it's just because there's an abundance of Japanese language learning content online, but GPT 4o has been incredibly useful in learning Japanese. I can ask it things like "how would a native speaker express X?" And it would give me some good answers that even my Japanese teacher agreed with. It can also give some incredibly accurate breakdowns of grammar. I've tried with less popular languages like Filipino and it just isn't the same, but as far as Japanese goes it's like having a tutor on standby 24/7. In fact, that's exactly how I've been using it - I have it grade my own translations and give feedback on what could've been said more naturally.
All this to say, AI when used as a tool, rather than a dystopic stand-in for a human, can be a very useful one. So, what are some use cases you guys have where AI actually is pretty useful?
Can you give me some vague examples?
It's obviously confirmation bias but LLM prose always seems so useless.
Basically I want to say like "no the issue is not on our side you need to check your end" gpt would add some niceness and fluff to make it sound better it would say "I hope this finds you well, it seems there may be an issue on your end. Could you please look into this and let me know if there is anything I can do from our side to help resolve this issue? I'm happy to provide any additional information or assistance that may be needed. Thank you for your attention to this matter I look forward to hearing back from you"
Its useless but I find that without the fluff people genuinely think the first message is angry or annoyed when i don't mean for the message to be anything like that.
Does anyone actually have jobs writing emails like that all day though?
Ticket systems often have an auto-response like "did you turn it off and on again".
Most email clients or even gmail have canned response plugins.
IDK. This probably is a great use case and someone doing this might be quicker and better than me using canned responses or whatever... but only incrementally, not by an order of magnitude.
I haven't seen gmail used in a business setting and I don't think the auto responses cut it all the time. There is usually a message I want to get across but I don't want to risk making the other person defensive or upset so I use ai to soften it.
Its good for apologies because I'm usually not sorry for whatever happened and find it hard to pretend.
Loads of people use Google workspace and most email clients have this feature, or if they don't most people in customer service would just keep a document they can copy & paste from.
Regardless, if an LLM helps you with these tasks then that's great.