LLM based AI was a fun toy when it first broke. Everyone was curious and wanted to play with it, which made it seem super popular. Now that the novelty has worn off, most people are bored and unimpressed with it. The problem is that the tech bros invested so much money in it and they are unwilling to take the loss. They are trying to force it so that they can say they didn’t waste their money.
Honestly they’re still impressive and useful it’s just the hype train overload and trying to implement them in areas they either don’t fit or don’t work well enough yet.
AI does a good job of generating character portraits for my TTRPG games. But, really, beyond that I haven’t found a good use for it.
…also TTRPH, TTRPI, TTRPJ, TTRPK, TTRPL, TTRPM, TTRPN, TTRPO, TTRPP, TTRPQ, TTRPR, TTRPS, TTRPT, TTRPU, TTRPV, TTRPW, TTRPX, TTRPY and TTRPZ games.
But beyond that, no good use, no siree.
PS: spoiler
that was WAY harder to type than I expected.
One place where I found AI usefull is in generating search queries in JIRA. Not having to deal with their query language every time I have to change a search filter, but being able to just use the built in AI to query in natural language has already saved me like two or three minutes in total in the last two months.
So far that’s been the best use of AI for me too. I’ve also used it to help flesh out character backgrounds, and then I just go through and edit it.
Yeah exactly, as a tool that doesn’t need to be perfect to give you a starting point it’s excellent. But companies sort of forgot the “as a tool” part and are just implementing ai outright in places it’s not ready yet like drive-thru windows or voice only interface devices…it’s not ready for that shit currently (if it ever truly will be).
They are all completely half-baked products being rolled out before they’re ready because none of these billion dollar tech companies will allow a product to not immediately generate revenue.
I’m really enjoying seeing the backlash of everyone unanimously being sick of having this unfinished tech shoved down our throats.
Even in areas where they would fit it’s really annoying how some companies are trying to push it down our throats.
It’s always some obnoxious UI element, screaming at me their 3 example questions, and I always sigh and think, “I have to assume you can only answer these 3 particular questions, and why would I ask those questions, and when I ask UI questions I expect precise answers so would I want to use AI for that.”
I have no doubt that LLM’s have more uses than I can think of, but come on…
I’m happy for studies like this. People who are trying to smear their AI all over our faces need to calm, the f…k, down.
I agree with this, my sentiments exactly as well. Getting AI pushed towards us from every direction & really never asked for it. Like to use it for certain things but go to it when needed. Don’t want it in everything, at least personally.
Many of us who are old enough saw it as an advanced version of ELIZA and used it with the same level of amusement until that amusement faded (pretty quick) because it got old.
If anything, they are less impressive because tricking people into thinking a computer is actually having a conversation with them has been around for a long time.
So you want to tell me they all spent billions and made huge data centres that suck more power than small country so we can all play with it say it was fun and then toss it away?
This is kinda insane if that’s how it will play out
Not the first time this has happened. Even recently. See NFTs. Venture capitalists hear “tech buzzword” and throw money at it because if they’re lucky, it’s the next Google. Or at least it gets an IPO and they can cash out.
Yeah but like we could be doing something worthwhile with all these finite resources it makes me a bit dizzy
We could, but they don’t care about making the world a better place. They care about getting rich. And then if everything collapses, they can go to their private island or their doomsday vault or whatever and enjoy the apocalypse.
Are you like 80?
No, 47. Believe it or not, the first PCs came out when I was a young whippersnapper.
IBM 486 was my first PC as a kid. Throw in those floppys and game on DOS!
I have 6.22 and Win3.11 running in a VM for fun.
Mine was an Apple ][+.
(And yes, that’s how you write it properly. I’m a pedant.)
When I was a kid my folks bought the TI 99/4A for some ridiculous reason. It’s interesting to look back at the weird hardware that never made it, like the cartridges that thing used instead of 5¼" floppies that were also out at the time. Maybe it reminded them of inserting 8 tracks.
The TI99 had an (optional) external expansion box that allowed it to use floppy disks.
I think the 99/4A also had a cassette tape drive you could buy. I don’t think they ever made a floppy drive for it though.
I would have it no other way. I am the same. 😂
Fuck yea man, Dr Sbaitso was the one for me. I loved that shit. It still fucks with people when I bust that out on Dosbox.
Doggdorzbaydzoh.
Oh OK cause the article you sent mentioned ELIZA being developed between 1964-67 so I had to ask.
I really fucking hated the android update where holding the power button summons Gemini before actually giving you the shut down menu.
Also just listening and reading what people say. We don’t want fucking AI anything. We understand what it might do. We don’t want it.
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Citation please?
You’re mad that someone investigates and elaborates on causes of why using llm marketing bullshit is a bad idea? Weird.
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To be honest, I lost all interest in the new AMD CPUs because they fucking named the thing “AI” (with zero real-world application).
I’m in the market for a new PC next month and I’m gonna get the 7800X3D for my VR gaming needs.
AI is garbage.
AI is just an excuse to lay off your employees for an objectively less reliable computer program, which somehow statistically beats us in logic.
I’ve used LLMs a lot over the post couple years. Pro tip. Use it a lot and learn the models. Then they look much more intelligent as you the user becomes better. Obviously if you prompt “Write me a shell script to calculate the meaning of life, make my coffee, and scratch my nuts before 9AM” it will be a grave disappointment.
If you first design a ball fondling/scratching robot, use multiple instances of LLMs to help you plan it out, etc. then you may be impressed.
I think one of the biggest problems is that most people interacting with llms forget they are running on computers and that they are digital and not like us. You can’t make assumptions like you can with humans. Usually even when you do that with us you just get stuff you didn’t want because you weren’t clear enough. We are horrible at instructions and this is something I hope AI will help us learn how to do better. Because ultimately bad instructions or incomplete information doesn’t lead to being able to determine anything real. Computers are logic machines. If you tell a computer to go ride a bike at best it’ll go out and do all the work to embody itself in a robot and buy a bike and ride it. Wait, you don’t even know it did it though because you never specified for it to record the ride…
A very few of us are pretty good at giving computers clear instructions some of the time. Also though, I have found just forcing models to reason in context is powerful. You have to know to tell it to “use a drill down tree style approach to problem solving. Use reflection and discussion to explore and find the optimal solution to reasoning through the problem.” Might still give you bad results. That is why you have to experiment. It is a lot of fun if you really just let your thoughts run wild. It takes a lot of creative thinking right now to really get the most out of these models. They should all be 110% open source and free for all. BTW Gemini 1.5 and Claude and Llama 3.1 are all great, nd Llama you can run locally or on a rented GPU VM. OpenAI I’m on the fence about but given who all is involved over there I wouldn’t say I would trust them. Especially since they want to do a regulatory capture.
Asking the chat models to have self-disccusion and use/simulate metacognition really seems to help. Play around with it. Often times I am deep in a chat and I learn from its mistakes, it kinda learns from my mistakes and feedback. It is all about working with and not against. Because at this time LLMs are just feed forward neural networks trained on supercomputer clusters. We really don’t even know what they are capable of fully because it is so hard to quantify, especially when you don’t really know what exactly has been learned.
Q-learning in language is also an interesting methodology I’ve been playing with. With an imagine generator for example though, you can just add (Q-learning quality) and you may get more interesting and quality results. Which itself is very interesting to me.
Yet companies are manipulating survey results to justify the FOMO jump to AI bandwagon. I don’t know where companies get the info that people want AI (looking at you Proton).
We’re seeing a bunch of promises made when LLM were the novel hot shit. Now that we’ve plateaued on how useful they are to the average consumer every AI product is just a beta test that will drop support as soon as something newer and shinier comes along.
I think there is potential for using AI as a knowledge base. If it saves me hours of having to scour the internet for answers on how to do certain things, I could see a lot of value in that.
The problem is that generative AI can’t determine fact from fiction, even though it has enough information to do so. For instance, I’ll ask Chat GPT how to do something and it will very confidently spit out a wrong answer 9/10 times. If I tell it that that approach didn’t work, it will respond with “Sorry about that. You can’t do [x] with [y] because [z] reasons.” The reasons are often correct but ChatGPT isn’t “intelligent” enough to ascertain that an approach will fail based on data that it already has before suggesting it.
It will then proceed to suggest a variation of the same failed approach several more times. Every once in a while it will eventually pivot towards a workable suggestion.
So basically, this generation of AI is just Cliff Clavin from Cheers. Able to to sting together coherent sentences of mostly bullshit.
I’ve learned to hate companies that replaced their support staff with AI. I don’t mind if it supplements easy stuff, that should take like 15 seconds, but when I have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get to the one lone bastard stuck running the support desk on their own, I start to wonder why I give them any money at all.
For me, if a company fails to make a clear cut case about why a product of theirs needs AI, I’m gonna assume they just want to misuse AI to cheaply deliver a mediocre product instead of putting in the necessary cost of manhours.
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Be me
Early adopter of LLMs ever since a random tryout of Replika blew my mind and I set out to figure what the hell was generating its responses
Learn to fine-tune GPT-2 models and have a blast running 30+ subreddit parody bots on r/SubSimGPT2Interactive, including some that generate weird surreal imagery from post titles using VQGAN+CLIP
Have nagging concerns about the industry that produced these toys, start following Timnit Gebru
Begin to sense that something is going wrong when DALLE-2 comes out, clearly targeted at eliminating creative jobs in the bland corporate illustration market. Later, become more disturbed by Stable Diffusion making this, and many much worse things, possible, at massive scale
Try to do something about it by developing one of the first “AI Art” detection tools, intended for use by moderators of subreddits where such content is unwelcome. Get all of my accounts banned from Reddit immediately thereafter
Am dismayed by the viral release of ChatGPT, essentially the same thing as DALLE-2 but text
Grudgingly attempt to see what the fuss is about and install Github Copilot in VSCode. Waste hours of my time debugging code suggestions that turn out to be wrong in subtle, hard-to-spot ways. Switch to using Bing Copilot for “how-to” questions because at least it cites sources and lets me click through to the StackExchange post where the human provided the explanation I need. Admit the thing can be moderately useful and not just a fun dadaist shitposting machine. Have major FOMO about never capitalizing on my early adopter status in any money-making way
Get pissed off by Microsoft’s plans to shove Copilot into every nook and cranny of Windows and Office; casually turn on the Opympics and get bombarded by ads for Gemini and whatever the fuck it is Meta is selling
Start looking for an alternative to Edge despite it being the best-performing web browser by many metrics, as well as despite my history with “AI” and OK-ish experience with Copilot. Horrified to find that Mozilla and Brave are doing the exact same thing
Install Vivaldi, then realize that the Internet it provides access to is dead and enshittified anyway
Daydream about never touching a computer again despite my livelihood depending on it
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I’ve sold actual zero trust, actual AI, actual DevX, etc… I’m so tired of “yeah, everyone else just throws a label on, why the fuck do I need AI in my bank app? We have the REAL blah blah blah”
I’ve found ChatGPT somewhat useful, but not amazingly so. The thing about ChatGPT is, I understand what the tool is, and our interactions are well defined. When I get a bullshit answer, I have the context to realize it’s not working for me in this case and to go look elsewhere. When AI is built in to products in ways that you don’t clearly understand what parts are AI and how your interactions are fed to it; that’s absolutely and incurably horrible. You just have to reject the whole application; there is no other reasonable choice.
AI is a neat toy… but that’s all it is. It’s horrible at almost every real-world application it’s been forced into, and that’s before you wander into the whole shifting minefield of ethical concerns or consider how wildly untrustworthy they are.
It’s really simple: There are a number of use cases where generative AI is a legitimate boon. But there are countless more use cases where AI is unnecessary and provides nothing but bloat, maybe novelty at best.
Generative AI is neither the harbinger or doom, nor the savior of humanity. It’s a tool. Just a tool. We’re just caught in this weird moment where people are acting like it’s an all-encompassing multipurpose tool right now instead of understanding it as the limited use specific tool it actually is.
