Asklemmy

I generate D&D characters and NPCs with it, but that's not really a strong argument.

For programming though it's quite handy. Basically a smarter code completion that takes the already written stuff into account. From machine code through assembly up to higher languages, I think it's a logical next step to be able to tell the computer, in human language, what you actually are trying to achieve. That doesn't mean it is taking over while the programmer switches off their brain of course, but it already saved me quite some time.

I think genAI would be pretty neat for ~~bit banging tests~~ fuzzing, aka. Throwing semi-random requests and/or signals at some device in the hopes of finding obscure edge-cases or security holes.

It's pretty good at looking up readily available knowledge that doesn't have a lot of nuance to it. There's a lot of stuff you can look up but it always comes with a grain of salt.

Home remedies, bunch of baby facts like poop color meaning, recipes and adjustments, programming examples (requires very prompting skills).

Rewriting stuff into business English is another very nice use case. Tell the AI your qualitifations, ask to make a cover letter for "job description" then review. Drafting text and summarising also pretty good.

Adding modifiers to questions like "list of 20 for X" for a brainstorming or "include how scientifically reliable the claim is on scale of 1-10" really help with getting a good answer and some nuance to whatever claims.

It's touted as the be all end all but in reality the use cases are very specific in my experience.

I know they are being used to, and are decently good for, extracting a single infornation from a big document (like a datasheet). Considering you can easily confirm the information is correct, it's quite a nice use case

I'd say there are probably as many genuine use-cases for AI as there are people in denial that AI has genuine use-cases.

Top of my head:

• Text editing. Write something (e.g. e-mails, websites, novels, even code) and have an LLM rewrite it to suit a specific tone and identify errors.
• Creative art. You claim generative AI art is soulless and poor quality, to me, that indicates a lack of familiarity with what generative AI is capable of. There are tools to create entire songs from scratch, replace the voice of one artist with another, remove unwanted background noise from songs, improve the quality of old songs, separate/add vocal tracks to music, turn 2d models into 3d models, create images from text, convert simple images into complex images, fill in missing details from images, upscale and colourise images, separate foregrounds from backgrounds.
• Note taking and summarisation (e.g. summarising meeting minutes or summarising a conversation or events that occur).
• Video games. Imagine the replay value of a video game if every time you play there are different quests, maps, NPCs, unexpected twists, and different puzzles? The technology isn't developed enough for this at the moment, but I think this is something we will see in the coming years. Some games (Skyrim and Fallout 4 come to mind) have a mod that gives each NPC AI generated dialogue that takes into account the NPC's personality and history.
• Real time assistance for a variety of tasks. Consider a call centre environment as one example, a model can be optimised to evaluate calls based on language and empathy and correctness of information. A model could be set up with a call centre's knowledge base that listens to the call and locates information based on a caller's enquiry and tells an agent where the information is located (or even suggests what to say, though this is currently prone to hallucination).

Another point valid for GPTs is getting started on ideas and things, sorting out mind messes, getting useful data out of large amounts of clusterfucks of text, getting a general direction.

Current downsides are you cannot expect factual answers on topics it has no access to as it'll hallucinate on these without telling you, many GPT provides use your data so you cannot directly ask it sensitive topics, it'll forget datapoints if your conversation goes on too long.

As for image generation, it's still often stuck in the uncanny valley. Only animation topics benefit right now within the amateur realm. Cannot say how much GPTs are professionally used currently.

All of these are things you could certainly do yourself and often better/faster than an AI. But sometimes you just need a good enough solution and that's where GPTs shine more and more often. It's just another form of automation - if used for repetitive/stupid tasks, it's fine. Just don't expect it to just build you a piece of fully working bug-free software just by asking it. That's not how automation works. At least not to date.

I think LLMs could be great if they were used for education, learning and trained on good data. The encyclopedia Britannica is building an AI exclusively trained on its data.

It also allows for room for writers to add more to the database, to provide broader knowledge for the AI, so people keep their jobs.

What doesn't exist yet, but is obviously possible, is automatic tweening. Human animators spend a lot of time drawing the drawings between other drawings. If they could just sketch out what's going on, about once per second, they could probably do a minute in an hour. This bullshit makes that feasible.

We have the technology to fill in crisp motion at whatever framerate the creator wants. If they're unhappy with the machine's guesswork, they can insert another frame somewhere in-between, and the robot will reroute to include that instead.

We have the technology to let someone ink and color one sketch in a scribbly animatic, and fill that in throughout a whole shot. And then possibly do it automatically for all labeled appearances of the same character throughout the project.

We have the technology to animate any art style you could demonstrate, as easily as ink-on-celluloid outlines or Phong-shaded CGI.

Please ignore the idiot money robots who are rendering eye-contact-mouth-open crowd scenes in mundane settings in order to sell you branded commodities.

Documentation work, synthesis, sentiment analysis

Video generators are going to eat Hollywood alive. A desktop computer can render anything, just by feeding in a rough sketch and describing what it's supposed to be. The input could be some kind of animatic, or yourself and a friend in dollar-store costumes, or literal white noise. And it'll make that look like a Pixar movie. Or a photorealistic period piece starring a dead actor. Or, given enough examples, how you personally draw shapes using chalk. Anything. Anything you can describe to the point where the machine can say it's more [thing] or less [thing], it can make every frame more [thing].

Boring people will use this to churn out boring fluff. Do you remember Terragen? It's landscape rendering software, and it was great for evocative images of imaginary mountains against alien skies. Image sites banned it, by name, because a million dorks went 'look what I made!' and spammed their no-effort hey-neat renders. Technically unique - altogether dull. Infinite bowls of porridge.

Creative people will use this to film their pet projects without actors or sets or budgets or anyone else's permission. It'll be better with any of those - but they have become optional. You can do it from text alone, as a feral demo that people think is the whole point. The results are massively better from even clumsy effort to do things the hard way. Get the right shapes moving around the screen, and the robot will probably figure out which ones are which, and remove all the pixels that don't look like your description.

The idiots in LA think they're gonna fire all the people who write stories. But this gives those weirdos all the power they need to put the wild shit inside their heads onto a screen in front of your eyeballs. They've got drawers full of scripts they couldn't hassle other people into making. Now a finished movie will be as hard to pull off as a decent webcomic. It's gonna get wild.

And this'll be great for actors, in ways they don't know yet.

Audio tools mean every voice actor can be a Billy West. You don't need to sound like anything, for your performance to be mapped to some character. Pointedly not: "mapped to some actor." Why would an animated character have to sound like any specific person? Do they look like any specific person? Does a particular human being play Naruto, onscreen? No. So a game might star Nolan North, exclusively, without any two characters really sounding alike. And if the devs need to add a throwaway line later, then any schmuck can half-ass the tone Nolan picked for little Suzy, and the audience won't know the difference. At no point will it be "licensing Nolan North's voice." You might have no idea what he sounds like. He just does a very convincing... everybody.

Video tools will work the same way for actors. You will not need to look like anything, to play a particular character. Stage actors already understand this - but it'll come to movies and shows in the form of deep fakes for nonexistent faces. Again: why would a character have to look like any specific person? They might move like a particular actor, but what you'll see is somewhere between motion-capture and rotoscoping. It's CGI... ish. And it thinks perfect photorealism is just another artistic style.

I have had some decent experiences with Copilot and coding in C#. I've asked it to help me figure out what was wrong with a LINQ query I was doing with an XDocument and it pointed me in the right direction where I figured it out. It also occasionally has some super useful auto complete blocks of code that actually match the pattern of what I'm doing.

As for art and such, sometimes people just want to see some random bizarre thing realized visually that they don't have the ability (or time/dedication) to realize themselves and it's not something serious that they would be commissioning an artist for anyway. I used Bing image creator recently to generate a little character portrait for an online DND game I'm playing in since I couldn't find quite what I was looking for with an image search (which is what I usually do for those).

I've seen managers at my job use it to generate fun, relevant imagery for slideshows that otherwise would've been random boring stock images (or just text).

It has actual helpful uses, but every major corporation that has a stake in it just added to or listened to the propaganda really hard, which has caused problems for some people; like the idiot who proudly fired all of his employees because he replaced all their jobs with automation and AI, then started hunting for actual employees to hire again a couple months later because everything was terrible and nothing worked right.

They're just tools that can potentially aid people, but they're terrible replacements for actual people. I write automated tests for a living, and companies will always need people for that. If they fired me and the other QAs tomorrow, things would be okay for a short while thanks to the automation we've built, but as more and more code changes go into our numerous and labyrinthine systems, more and more bugs would get through without someone to maintain the automation.

If you don’t know what you are doing and ask LLMs for code then you are gonna waste time debugging it without understanding but if you are just asking it for boiler plate stuff, or are asking it to add comments and print outs to console for existing code for debugging, it’s really great for that. Sometimes it needs chastising or corrections but so do humans.

I find it very useful but not worth the environmental cost or even the monetary cost. With how enshittified Google has become now though I find that ChatGPT has become a necessary evil to find reliable answers to simple queries.

I use it to sort days and create tables which is really helpful. And the other thing that really helped me and I would have never tried to figure out on my own:

I work with the open source GIS software qgis. I'm not a cartographer or a programmer but a designer. I had a world map and wanted to create geojson files for each country. So I asked chatgpt if there was a way to automate this within qgis and sure thing it recommend to create a Python script that could run in the software, to do just that and after a few tweaks it did work. that saved me a lot of time and annoyances. Would it be good to know Python? Sure but I know my brain has a really hard time with code and script. It never clicked and likely never will. So I'm very happy with this use case. Creative work could be supported in a drafting phase but I'm not so sure about this.

Never used it until recently. Now I use it to vent because I'm a crazy person.

It has value in natural language processing, like turning unstructured natural language data into structured data. Not suitable for all situations though, like situations that cannot tolerate hallucinations.

Its also good for reorganizing information and presenting it in a different format; and also classification of semantic meaning of text. It's good for pretty much anything dealing with semantic meaning, really.

I see people often trying to use generative AI as a knowledge store, such as asking an AI assistant factual questions, but this is an invalid usecase.

Idea generation.

E.g., I asked an LLM client for interactive lessons for teaching 4th graders about aerodynamics, esp related to how birds fly. It came back with 98% amazing suggestions that I had to modify only slightly.

A work colleague asked an LLM client for wedding vow ideas to break through writer's block. The vows they ended up using were 100% theirs, but the AI spit out something on paper to get them started.

I was asked to officiate my friend's wedding a few months back, I'm no writer, and I wanted to do a bit better than just a generic wedding ceremony for them

So I fired up chatgpt, told it I needed a script for a wedding ceremony, described some of the things I wanted to mention, some of the things they requested, and it spit out a pretty damn good wedding ceremony. I gave it a little once over and tweaked a little bit of what it gave me but 99% of it was pretty much just straight chatgpt. I got a lot of compliments on it.

I think that's sort of the use case. For those of us who aren't professional writers and public speakers, who have the general idea of what we need to say for a speech or presentation but can't quite string the words together in a polished way.

Here's pretty much what it spit out (Their wedding was in a cave)

Cell Phone Reminder

Officiant: Before we begin, I’d like to kindly remind everyone to silence your phones and put them away for the ceremony. Groom and Bride want this moment to be shared in person, free from distractions, so let's focus on the love and beauty of this moment.

Giving Away the Bride

And before we move forward, we have a special moment. Tradition asks: Who gives this woman to be married to this man?

[Response from Bride's dad]

Thank you.

Greeting

Welcome, everyone. We find ourselves here in this remarkable setting—surrounded by the quiet strength of these ancient walls, a fitting place for Groom and Bride to declare their love. The cave, much like marriage, is carved out over time—through patience, care, and sometimes a little hard work. And yet, what forms is something enduring, something that stands the test of time.

Today, we’re here to witness Groom and Bride join their lives together in marriage. In this moment, we’re reminded that love is not about perfection, but about commitment—choosing one another, day after day, even when things get messy, or difficult, or dark. And through it all, we trust in love to guide us, just as God’s love guides us through life’s journey.

Declaration of Intent

[Officiant turns toward Groom and Bride]

Groom, Bride, you are about to make promises to each other that will last a lifetime. Before we continue, I’ll ask each of you to answer a very important question.

Officiant: Groom, do you take Bride to be your lawfully wedded wife, to have and to hold, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, for as long as you both shall live?

Groom: I do.

Officiant: Bride, do you take Groom to be your lawfully wedded husband, to have and to hold, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, for as long as you both shall live?

Bride: I do.

Exchange of Vows

Officiant: Now, as a sign of this commitment, Groom and Bride will exchange their vows—promises made not just to each other, but before all of us here and in the sight of God.  

[Groom and Bride share their vows]

Rings

Officiant: The rings you’re about to exchange are a symbol of eternity, a reminder that your love, too, is without end. May these rings be a constant reminder of the vows you have made today, and of the love that surrounds and holds you both.

[Groom and Bride exchange rings]

Officiant: And now, by the power vested in me, and with the blessing of God, I pronounce you husband and wife. Groom you may kiss your bride.

[Groom and Bride kiss]

Officiant: Friends and family, it is my great honor to introduce to you, for the first time, Mr. and Mrs. [Name].

I pretty much just tweaked the formatting, worked in a couple little friendly jabs at the groom, subbed their names in for Bride and Groom, and ad-libbed a little bit where appropriate

simple tasks you can verify yourself and you're just rolling dice for some time saved. everything else is kinda shit

There was a legitimate use case in art to draw on generative AI for concepts and a stopgap for smaller tasks that don't need to be perfect. While art is art, not every designer out there is putting work out for a gallery - sometimes it's just an ad for a burger.

However, as time has gone on for the industry to react I think that the business reality of generative AI currently puts it out of reach as a useful tool for artists. Profit hungry people in charge will always look to cut corners and will lack the nuance of context that a worker would have when deciding when or not to use AI in the work.

But you could provide this argument about any tool given how fucked up capitalism is. So I guess that my 2c - generative AI is a promising tool but capitalism prevents it from being truly useful anytime soon.

I just use it for fun. Like, my own personal iPhone backgrounds and stuff. Sometimes I’ll share them with friends or on Mastodon or whatever, but that’s about it.

Gemini is fun to dink around with. When it works…

Just today I needed a pdf with filler english text, not lorem. ChatGPT was perfect for that. Other times when I'm writing something I use it to check grammar. It's way better at it than grammarly imo, and faster and makes the decisions for me BUT PROOF-READ IT. if you really fuck the tenses up it won't know how to correct it, it'll make things up. Besides these: text manipulation. I could learn vim, write a script, or I could just copy "remove the special characters" enter -> done.

I use perplexity for syntax. I don't code with it, but it's the perfect one stop shop for "how does this work in this lang again" when coding. For advanced/new/unpopular APIs it's back to the olds school docs, but you could try to give it the link so it parses it for you, it's usually wonky tho.

I treat it as a newish employee. I don't let it do important tasks without supervision, but it does help building something rough that I can work on.

The winter storm was set to arrive while I’m traveling, and I needed to drip our faucets to avoid our pipes bursting. I didn’t want to waste water from a dripping faucet for more than a week, so I asked duckduckgo AI to calculate how much water will 1 drop a second accumulate and if it will overflow on a standard baththub with the drain closed. I can do the math myself, but it’s easier for AI to do it.

Programming quick scripts and replacement for Google/Wikipedia more than anything. I chat to it on an app to ask about various facts or info I wanted to know. And it usually gets in depth pretty quickly.

Also cooking. I've basically given up on recipe sites, except for niche, specific things. AI gets stuff relatively right and quickly adjusts if I need substitutions. (And again, hands free for my sticky flour fingers).

And ideation. Whether I'm coming up with names, or a specific word, or clothes, or a joke, I can ask AI for 50 examples and I can usually piece together a result I like from a couple of those.

Finally, I'll admit I use it as a sounding board to think through topics, when a real human who can empathise would absolutely be better. Sadly, the way modern life is, one isn't always available. It's a small step up from ELIZA.

The key is that AI is part of the process. Just as I would never say "trust the first Google result with your life", because its some internet rando who might say anything, so too should you not let AI have the final word. I frequently question or correct it, but it still helps the journey.

In the context of programming:

• Good for boilerplate code and variables naming when what you want is for the model to regurgitate things it has seen before.
• Short pieces of code where it's much faster to verify that the code is correct than to write the code yourself.
• Sometimes, I know how to do something but I'll wait for Copilot to give me a suggestion, and if it looks like what I had in mind, it gives me extra confidence in the correctness of my solution. If it looks different, then it's a sign that I might want to rethink it.
• It sometimes gives me suggestions for APIs that I'm not familiar with, prompting me to look them up and learn something new (assuming they exist).

There's also some very cool applications to game AI that I've seen, but this is still in the research realm and much more niche.

I use it for coding, mostly as a time saver. Generally as I'm typing, it will give a suggestion that's functionally the same as what I was going to type anyway so I hit tab and go to the next line. It's able to do this accurately for around 80% of the total lines that I'm writing and going from writing full lines to writing 0-3 characters + tab on most of those lines makes a massive speed difference. It's especially great for writing one off scripts when I'm doing something that's not even a coding project, but there's some tedious file juggling involved. Writing a script completely by hand for that often would take slightly longer than just doing the task manually, and as I said, it's a one-off. But writing the script with copilot often takes as little as 10% of the time which is really nice.

Even in cases where I don't already know how to solve a problem (particularly a problem involving specific integrations) it can often be faster to ask it how to solve the problem and then look up the specific functions, endpoints, etc it uses in the docs rather than trying to find those doc entries directly with a search. And if it hallucinates a function that doesn't exist in the docs then I tell it that and it often successfully corrects itself. When it fails more than once I've generally found that there's a high probability that the SDK/API/etc I'm looking at doesn't have anything that does what I need so it's time for me to start rethinking my approach

Outside of coding, I also use stable diffusion to generate images of D&D characters I'm creating instead of image searching and settling for something kind of close to what I was picturing.

I also regularly use SD when I stumble upon some art I'd like to use as a desktop wallpaper, but can't find at high enough resolution. I just upscale it and proceed. Sometimes I'll have something at the wrong aspect ratio and use generative fill to extend the edges of the image to the desired aspect ratio, those parts of the image are nothing special, but the important part is the original image and I just need some filler to prevent it from abruptly ending before the edges of the screen.

One last case is if I need to put together a tediously long document, I generally find that having it generate a first draft with the right structure and then iterating a bunch on that comes more easily than starting with an empty page.

I wrote guidelines for my small business. Then I uploaded the file to chatgpt and asked it to review it.

It made legitimately good suggestions and rewrote the documents using better sounding English.

Because of chatgpt I will be introducing more wellness and development programs.

Additionally, I need med images for my website. So instead of using stock photos, I was able to use midjourney to generate a whole bunch of images in the same style that fit the theme of my business. It looks much better.

I have personally found it fantastic as a programming aid, and as a writing aid to write song lyrics. The art it creates lacks soul and any sense of being actually good but it's great as a "oh I could do this cool thing" inspiration machine

My understanding is that it will eventually used to improve autocorrect, when they get it working properly.

I use it for providing a text summary of YouTube videos that I can parse quickly. Because everything has to be a gorram video these days.

art. It's a new medium, get over it

Best use is to ask it questions that you're not sure how to ask. Sometimes you come across a problem that you're not really even sure how to phrase, which makes Googling difficult. LLM's at least would give you a better sense of what to Google

I use it to help with programming and writing. Not as a way to have something so it for me but as something that can show me how to do something I am stuck on or give me ideas when Im drawing a blank.

Kinda like an interactive rubber duck. Its solutions arent always right or accurate but it does help me get past things I struggle with.

shitposting.

Need some weidly specific imagery about whatever you're going on about? It got you covered