I’ve seen a lot of sentiment around Lemmy that AI is “useless”. I think this tends to stem from the fact that AI has not delivered on, well, anything the capitalists that push it have promised it would. That is to say, it has failed to meaningfully replace workers with a less expensive solution - AI that actually attempts to replace people’s jobs are incredibly expensive (and environmentally irresponsible) and they simply lie and say it’s not. It’s subsidized by that sweet sweet VC capital so they can keep the lie up. And I say attempt because AI is truly horrible at actually replacing people. It’s going to make mistakes and while everybody’s been trying real hard to make it less wrong, it’s just never gonna be “smart” enough to not have a human reviewing its’ behavior. Then you’ve got AI being shoehorned into every little thing that really, REALLY doesn’t need it. I’d say that AI is useless.
But AIs have been very useful to me. For one thing, they’re much better at googling than I am. They save me time by summarizing articles to just give me the broad strokes, and I can decide whether I want to go into the details from there. They’re also good idea generators - I’ve used them in creative writing just to explore things like “how might this story go?” or “what are interesting ways to describe this?”. I never really use what comes out of them verbatim - whether image or text - but it’s a good way to explore and seeing things expressed in ways you never would’ve thought of (and also the juxtaposition of seeing it next to very obvious expressions) tends to push your mind into new directions.
Lastly, I don’t know if it’s just because there’s an abundance of Japanese language learning content online, but GPT 4o has been incredibly useful in learning Japanese. I can ask it things like “how would a native speaker express X?” And it would give me some good answers that even my Japanese teacher agreed with. It can also give some incredibly accurate breakdowns of grammar. I’ve tried with less popular languages like Filipino and it just isn’t the same, but as far as Japanese goes it’s like having a tutor on standby 24/7. In fact, that’s exactly how I’ve been using it - I have it grade my own translations and give feedback on what could’ve been said more naturally.
All this to say, AI when used as a tool, rather than a dystopic stand-in for a human, can be a very useful one. So, what are some use cases you guys have where AI actually is pretty useful?
Software developer here, who works for a tiny company of
27 employees and 2 owners.We use CoPilot in Visual Studio Professional and it’s saved us countless hours due to it learning from your code base. When you make a enterprise software there are a lot of standards and practices that have been honed over time; that means we write the same things over and over and over again, this is a massive time sink and this is where LLMs come in and can do the boring stuff for us so we can actually solve the novel problems that we are paid for. If I write a comment of what I’m about to do it will complete it.
For boiler plate stuff it’s mostly 100% correct, for other things it can be anywhere from 0-100% and even if not complete correct it takes less time to make a slight change than doing it all ourselves.
One of the owners is the smartest person I’ve ever met and also the lead engineer, if he can find it useful then it has its use cases.
We even have a tool based on AI that he built that watches our project. If I create a new model or add a field to a model, it will scaffold a lot of stuff, for instance the Schemas (Mutations and Queries), the Typescript layer that integrates with GraphQL, and basic views. This alone saves us about 45 minutes per model. Sure this could likely be achieved without an LLM, but it’s a useful tool and we have embraced it.
Sorry to hear about your codebase being leaked.
This isn’t something that happens when you’re paying for a premium subscription. Sure they could go against terms and conditions but that would mean lawsuits and such.