I know its a bit of a hot topic but I’ve always seen people (online anyways) are either a hard yes or absolutely no on using AI. There are many types of “AI” that have already been part of technology before this hype, I’m talking about LLMs specifically (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc…). When this bubble burst its absolutely not going anywhere. I’m wondering if there is case where you’ve personally used it and found it beneficial (not something you’ve read or seen somewhere). The ethics of essentially stealing vast amount of data for training without compensation or enshitification of products with “AI” is a whole other topic but there is absolutely no way that the use of the technology itself is not beneficial somehow. Like everything else divisive the truth is definitely somewhere in the middle. I’ve been using lumo from proton for the last three weeks and its not bad. I’ve personally found it useful in helping me troubleshoot issues, search or just use it to help with applying for jobs:
- its very good at looking past SEO slop plaguing the internet and it just gets me the information I need. I’ve tried alternative search engine (mojeek, startpage, searXNG, DDG, Qwant, etc…) Most of them unfortunately aren’t very good or are just another way to use google or bing.
- I was having some wifi problem on a pc i was setting up and i couldn’t figure out why. i told it exactly what was happening with my computer along with exact specs. It gave gave me some possible reasons and some steps to try and analyze my computer it was very very useful.
- I’ve been applying for so many jobs and it so exhausting to read hundreds of description see one tiny thing in the middle that disqualifies me so I pass it my resume with links and tell it to compare what i say on my resume and what the job is looking for to see if im a fit. When i find a good job i ask rewriting tips to better focus on what will stand out to a recruiter (or an application filtering system to be real).
I guess what I’m trying to say is it cant all be bad.
I ask for information sometimes that I cannot find in few minutes of googling (I use a lot of this information in writing fiction). I generate images once in a while for role playing and storywriting. (Not sure if it is AI but) I turn some text over to speech, to listen at my stories.
It’s good for rapid output of plausibly human text that can then be sorted or assessed for adequate validity or utility. That’s all.
I self host Deepseek R1 and it’s been pretty helpful with simple Linux troubleshooting, generating bash commands, and even programming troubleshooting. The thinking feature is pretty cool and I do find myself learning stuff from it.
What took it from gimmick to actual nice to have for me is when my jerry rigged home network broke and wouldn’t connect to the internet. Having what is entially an interactive StackOverflow/ServerFault running on a local machine was really helpful.
Running the model locally makes it easier to not overly rely on AI because of the limited token rate.
I used to spend days rotoscoping people in videos. Generative infill for background painting and automatic rotoscoping have saved probably a year of my life at this point. Image generation relies on CLIP, which needs a language model for conditioning.
Best use for me has been feeding it logs and pcaps, incorporating it into Wireshark sounds far more useful to me than summarizing a two-line email.
A couple so far. I have a local copy of Stable Diffusion. It’s handy for upscaling some kinds of images. I’ll also use it to flesh out my worldbuilding project with landscapes and scenes.
Less often, I’ll consult ChatGPT, without logging in. For the times when a search engine doesn’t cut it but a forum post would be too much. I’m usually skeptical of AI summaries, but I find it justified for boiling down poorly-written stuff that I have to read, but isn’t worth my time in long form.
I don’t use it for writing code because that’s what I love but I use it for documentation and other stuff I hate…😂
We have a got at work that’s trained on all our internal docs and handbooks. It’s useful because you can ask it operational stuff like, “how do I request time off?” or “when are performance reviews?”
It’s good for stuff where you might not know who to ask or where to find the answer on internal stuff
It’s got lots of uses:
- driving up fossil fuel revenues
- providing a solid excuse for laying off a bunch of employees
- disciplining labor
- offloading blame for unpopular decisions
- increasing surveillance and nonconsensual data collection
It has been great at estimating calories in things. When possible, I compared to the actual food label, and it’s usually within a reasonable margin of error. But not everything is labeled, and when you’re on a diet it’s better to have at least something to go off of.
I’ve found lots of great uses. I find LLMs are great for grammar and spellchecking, acting as a sounding board, doing translations, writing shell scripts, digging through unfamiliar code bases, figuring out configurations for tools, finding relevant stuff in large documents, and they can be helpful for coding in languages I’m not well versed in.
You know those business books that combine flimsy pop psychology and self help literature with personal development and business goals? Yeah, those books with 300 pages and only one good idea per 100 pages if you’re lucky. Rest of it is just fabricated stories, ideas copied from other books and regurgitation of ideas from the previous chapters to fluff up the page count. Yes that category!
Well guess what? GPT can generate precisely that level of quality without any effort. In fact, it seems to gravitate towards that style unless you specifically work hard to steer it to aim higher. It has never been easier to become a business book author! Zero editing required. Just prompt and publish.
It feels like this is the one area where GPT excels.
Solo roleplay. You can make a character and interact. Generate fake conversations etc.
With generative images you can create custom backgrounds, portraits and landscapes instead of having to lookup for them or doing it yourself.
You can also do some interactive story telling that it’s kind of fun.
Generating quick test questions over a certain topic. It’s another use case I’ve seen it being quite good at.
Wow, what a cool idea, I never even considered this. Any other suggestions to this idea to add some fun?
If you want it to go unhinged try to get an uncensored llm. Dans PersonalityEngine by bartowski is my current favorite.
That stupid song about the Windows registry. Don’t look it up, or at least don’t come crying to me after listening to it 50 times. It has no right being as catchy as it is. I fear for younger people and how God generated music will sound in a year or two.
I used to ask why classical music wasn’t performed by Metal bands. Now I can have AI make it for me and it shouldn’t even be that hard given the songs are already written. Now if I were to say “compose a new symphony in the style of Beethoven and make it sound like Iron Maiden are playing it… that would be different.
I find it’s good as a “search engine of last resort”. I would pay $2 monthly at most for one, and less if it’s American.
