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?

  • @[email protected]English
    9•2 months ago

    I use it like an intern/other team member since the non-profit I work for doesn’t have any money to hire more people. Things like:

    • Taking transcripts of meetings and turning them into neat and ordered meeting minutes/summaries, or pulling out any key actions/next steps
    • Putting together objectives and agendas for meetings based on some loose info and ideas I give it
    • Summarise the key points from articles/long documents I don’t have tome or patience to read through fully.
    • Making my emails sound more professional/nicer/make up for my brainfarts
    • Giving me ideas on how to format/word slides and documents depending on what tone I want to employ - is it meant for leadership? Other team members?
    • Make my writing more organised/better structured/more professional sounding
    • Writing emails in foreign languages with a professional tone. Caveat is I’m fluent enough in those languages to know if the output sounds right. Before AI I would rely on google translate (meh), dictionaries, language forums, etc and it would take me HOURS to write a simple email using the correct terminology. Also helpful to check grammar and sentence structure in ways that aren’t always picked up by Word.
    • I sound more like a robot than an actual robot, so I ask the robot to reword my emails/messages to sound more “human” when the need arises (like a colleague is leaving, had a baby, etc).
    • Bouncing off ideas. This doesn’t always work and I know it doesn’t actually have an opinion, but it helps get the ball rolling, especially if I’m struggling with procrastination.
    • If my sentences are too long for a document, I ask it to shorten/reword and it’s pretty capable of doing that without losing too much of the essence of what I want to get across

    Of course I don’t just take whatever it spits out and paste it. I read through everything, make sure it still sounds more or less like “me”. Sometimes it’ll take a couple of prompts to get it to go where I want it, and takes a bit of review and editing but it saves me literal hours. It’s not necessarily perfect, but it does the job. I get it’s not a panacea, and it’s not great for the environment, but this tech is literally saving my sanity right now.

    • @[email protected]English
      0•2 months ago

      I couldn’t let an AI do any of this for me.

      As in… I couldn’t let anyone make my emails more professional or whatever.

      It’s not like I think my emails are always the best and can not be improved upon, it’s just that my emails are “me”.

      I never have cause to write an email in a foreign language.