It reduces effort in summarizing reports or paper abstracts that you aren’t sure you need to read. It reduces efforts in outlining formulaic types of writing such as cover letters, work emails etc.
It reduces effort when brainstorming mundane solutions to things, often by knocking off the most obvious choices but that’s an important step in brainstorming if you’ve ever done it.
Hell, I’ve never had chat GPT give me the wrong instructions when I ask it for a basic cooking recipe, and it also cuts out all of the preamble.
If you haven’t found uses for them, you either aren’t trying too hard or you’re simply not in an industry/job that can use them for what they are useful for. Both of which are ok, but it’s silly to think your experience of not using them means that no one can use them for anything useful.
Just because you haven’t personally gotten an egregiously wrong answer doesn’t meant it won’t give one, which means you have to check anyway. Google’s AI famously recommended adding glue to your pizza to make the cheese more stringy. Just a couple of weeks ago I got blatantly wrong information about quitting SSRIs with its source links directly contradicting it’s confidently stated conclusion. I had to spend EXTRA time researching just to make sure I wasn’t being gaslit.
That’s the thing. I didn’t want to use it. The AI’s input was entirely unsolicited and luckily I knew better than to trust it obviously. I doubt the average user is going to care enough to get a second opinion.
Creating a lot of filler “content” is also another use for them, which is what I was getting at. While I have seen some uses for AI, it overwhelmingly seems to be used to create more work than reduce it. Endless spam was bad enough, but now that there’s an easy way to generate mass amounts of convincingly unique text, it’s a lot more to wade through. Google search, for example, used to be a lot more useful, and results that were wastes of time were easier to spot. That summaries can include inaccuracies or outright “hallucinations” makes it mostly worthless to me since I’d have to at the very least skim the original material to verify just in case anyway.
I’ve seen AI in action in my industry (software development). I’ve seen it do the equivalent of slapping together code pieced together from Stack Overflow. It’s impressive that it can do that, but what’s less impressive are clueless developers trusting the code as-is with minimal verification/tweaks (just because it runs, doesn’t mean it’s correct or anywhere close to optimal) or the even more clueless executives who think this means they can replace developers with AI or that tasks are a simple matter of “ask the AI to do it”.
To add on to your comment. Even beyond job/industry, its like your cooking example. I spin up an llm locally at home for random tasks. An llm can be your personal fitness coach, help you with budgeting, improve your emails, summarize news articles, help with creative writing, christmas shopping list ideas, brainstorm plants for your new garden, etc etc. they can fit into so many simple roles that you sporadically need.
Its just so easy to fall into the trap of hating them because of the bullshit surrounding them.
It reduces effort in summarizing reports or paper abstracts that you aren’t sure you need to read. It reduces efforts in outlining formulaic types of writing such as cover letters, work emails etc.
It reduces effort when brainstorming mundane solutions to things, often by knocking off the most obvious choices but that’s an important step in brainstorming if you’ve ever done it.
Hell, I’ve never had chat GPT give me the wrong instructions when I ask it for a basic cooking recipe, and it also cuts out all of the preamble.
If you haven’t found uses for them, you either aren’t trying too hard or you’re simply not in an industry/job that can use them for what they are useful for. Both of which are ok, but it’s silly to think your experience of not using them means that no one can use them for anything useful.
Just because you haven’t personally gotten an egregiously wrong answer doesn’t meant it won’t give one, which means you have to check anyway. Google’s AI famously recommended adding glue to your pizza to make the cheese more stringy. Just a couple of weeks ago I got blatantly wrong information about quitting SSRIs with its source links directly contradicting it’s confidently stated conclusion. I had to spend EXTRA time researching just to make sure I wasn’t being gaslit.
Google’s AI is famously shitty. ChatGPT, and especially the most modern version is very good.
Also don’t use LLMs for sensitive stuff like quitting SSRIs yet.
That’s the thing. I didn’t want to use it. The AI’s input was entirely unsolicited and luckily I knew better than to trust it obviously. I doubt the average user is going to care enough to get a second opinion.
Right, that’s a problem you have with a corporation. Not the tool itself.
Creating a lot of filler “content” is also another use for them, which is what I was getting at. While I have seen some uses for AI, it overwhelmingly seems to be used to create more work than reduce it. Endless spam was bad enough, but now that there’s an easy way to generate mass amounts of convincingly unique text, it’s a lot more to wade through. Google search, for example, used to be a lot more useful, and results that were wastes of time were easier to spot. That summaries can include inaccuracies or outright “hallucinations” makes it mostly worthless to me since I’d have to at the very least skim the original material to verify just in case anyway.
I’ve seen AI in action in my industry (software development). I’ve seen it do the equivalent of slapping together code pieced together from Stack Overflow. It’s impressive that it can do that, but what’s less impressive are clueless developers trusting the code as-is with minimal verification/tweaks (just because it runs, doesn’t mean it’s correct or anywhere close to optimal) or the even more clueless executives who think this means they can replace developers with AI or that tasks are a simple matter of “ask the AI to do it”.
To add on to your comment. Even beyond job/industry, its like your cooking example. I spin up an llm locally at home for random tasks. An llm can be your personal fitness coach, help you with budgeting, improve your emails, summarize news articles, help with creative writing, christmas shopping list ideas, brainstorm plants for your new garden, etc etc. they can fit into so many simple roles that you sporadically need.
Its just so easy to fall into the trap of hating them because of the bullshit surrounding them.
Yeah as long as you double check their work and don’t assume their facts are accurate they’re pretty useful in a lot of ways.