• @[email protected]
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    294 hours ago

    I’m still really struggling to see an actual formidable use case for AI outside of computation and aiding in scientific research. Stop being lazy and write stuff. Why are we trying to give up everything that makes us human by offloading it to a machine?

    • @[email protected]
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      31 hour ago

      It’s good for speech to text, translation and a starting point for a “tip-of-my-tongue” search where the search term is what you’re actually missing.

    • @[email protected]
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      164 hours ago

      AI summaries of larger bodies of text work pretty well so long as the source text itself is not slop.

      Predictive text entry is a handy time saver so long as a human stays in the driver’s seat.

      Neither of these justify current levels of hype.

      • @[email protected]
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        3 hours ago

        Go look at the models available on huggingface.

        There’s applications in Visual Question Answering, Video to Text, Depth Estimation, 3D recreation from a photo, Object detection, visual classification, Translation from language to language, Text to realistic speech, Robotics Reinforcement learning, Weather Forecasting, and those are just surface-level models.

        It absolutely justifies current levels of hype because the research done now will absolutely put millions out of jobs; and will be much cheaper than paying people to do it.

        The people saying it’s hype are the same people who said the internet was a fad. Did we have a bubble of bullshit? Absolutely. But there is valid reason for the hype, and we will filter out the useless stuff eventually. It’s already changed entire industries practically overnight.

        • @[email protected]
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          42 hours ago

          the reactionary opinions are almost hilarious. they’re like “ha this AI is so dumb it can’t even do complex systems analysis! what a waste of time” when 5 years ago text generation was laughably unusable and AI generated images were all dog noses and birds.

        • Mbourgon everywhere
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          21 hour ago

          I think he’s talking about the LLMs, which…yeah. AI and LLMs are lumped together (which makes sense, but classification makes a huge difference here)

          • @[email protected]
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            20 minutes ago

            Even LLMs in the context of coding, I am no programmer - I have memory issues, and it means I can’t keep the web of information in my head long enough to debug the stuff I attempt to write.

            With AI assistants, I’ve been able to create multiple microcontroller projects that I wouldn’t have even started otherwise. They are amazing assistive technologies. Many times, they’re even better than language documentation themselves because they can give an example of something that almost works. So yes, even LLMs deserve the amount of hype they’ve been given. I’ve made a whole game-server management back-end for ARK servers with the help of an LLM (qwen-coder 14b).

            I couldn’t have done it otherwise; or I would have had to pay someone $60k; which I don’t have, and which means the software never would have existed.

            I’ve even moved onto modifying some open source Android apps for a specialized camera application. Compared to a normal programmer, sure - maybe it’s not as good. But having it next to me as an inexperienced nobody allows me to write programs I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to, or that would have been too daunting of a task.

    • @[email protected]
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      84 hours ago

      The relentless pursuit of capitalism and reduced labor costs. I still don’t think anyone knows how effective it’s going to be at this point. But companies are investing billions to find out.

    • CubitOom
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      43 hours ago

      It can be really good for text to speech and speech to text applications for disabled or people with learning disabilities.

      However it gets really funny and weird when it tries to read advanced mathematics formulas.

      I have also heard decent arguments for translation although in most cases it would still be better to learn the language or use a professional translator.

    • @[email protected]
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      23 hours ago

      I’m still really struggling to see an actual formidable use case

      It’s an excellent replacement for middle management blather. Content that has no backing in data or science but needs to sound important.

    • @[email protected]
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      3 hours ago

      I don’t use it for writing directly, but I do like to use it for worldbuilding. Because I can think of a general concept that could be explored in so many different ways, it’s nice to be able to just give it to an LLM and ask it to consider all of the possible ways it could imagine such an idea playing out. it also kind of doubles as a test because I usually have some sort of idea for what I’d like, and if it comes up with something similar on its own that kind of makes me feel like it would be something which would easily resonate with people. Additionally, a lot of the times it will come up with things that I hadn’t considered that are totally worth exploring. But I do agree that the only as you say “formidable” use case for this stuff at the moment is to use this thing as basically a research assistant for helping you in serious intellectual pursuits.