Ask Lemmy

It tends to make Lemmy people mad for some reason, but I find GitHub copilot to be helpful.

ChatGPT is incredibly good at helping you with random programming questions, or just dumping a full ass error text and it telling you exactly what's wrong.

This afternoon I used ChatGPT to figure out what the error preventing me from updating my ESXi server. I just copy pasted the entire error text which was one entire terminal windows worth of shit, and it knew that there was an issue accessing the zip. It wasn't smart enough to figure out "hey dumbass give it a full file path not relative" but eventually I got there. Earlier this morning I used it to write a cross apply instead of using multiple sub select statements. It forgot to update the order by, but that was a simple fix. I use it for all sorts of other things we do at work too. ChatGPT won't replace any programmers, but it will help them be more productive.

I created a funny AI voice recording of Ben Shapiro talking about cat girls.

AI is used extensively in science to sift through gigantic data sets. Mechanical turk programs like Galaxy Zoo are used to train the algorithm. And scientists can use it to look at everything in more detail.

Apart from that AI is just plain fun to play around with. And with the rapid advancements it will probably keep getting more fun.

Personally I hope to one day have an easy and quick way to sort all the images I have taken over the years. I probably only need a GPU in my server for that one.

Generative AI has been an absolute game changer in my retouching work. Slightly worrying that it'll put me out of work sometime in the future, but for now it's saving me loads of time, handling the boring stuff so I can concentrate on the stuff it can't do.

I agree, I don’t really use it but I do like some of the memes that came out of it, case in point:

I for one welcome our new overlords. (for the funny only)

Garbage in; garbage out. Using AI tools is a skillset. I've had great use with LLMs and generative AI both, you just have to use the tools to their strengths.

LLMs are language models. People run into issues when they try to use them for things not language related. Conversely, it's wonderful for other tasks. I use it to tone check things I'm unsure about. Or feed it ideas and let it run with them in ways I don't think to. It doesn't come up with too much groundbreaking or new on its own, but I think of it as kinda a "shuffle" button, taking what I have already largely put together, and messing around with it til it becomes something new.

Generative AI isn't going to make you the next mona Lisa, but it can make some pretty good art. It, once again, requires a human to work with it, though. You can't just tell it to spit out an image and expect 100% quality, 100% of the time. Instead, it's useful to get a basic idea of what you want in place, then take it to another proper photo editor, or inpainting, or some other kind of post processing to refine it. I have some degree of aphantasia - I have a hard time forming and holding detailed mental images. This kind of AI approaches art in a way that finally kinda makes sense for my brain, so it's frustrating seeing it shot down by people who don't actually understand it.

I think no one likes any new fad that's shoved down their throats. AI doesn't belong in everything. We already have a million chocolate chip cookie recipes, and chatgpt doesn't have taste buds. Stop using this stuff for tasks it wasn't meant for (unless it's a novelty "because we could" kind of way) and it becomes a lot more palatable.

My primary use of AI is for programming and debugging. It's a great way to get boilerplate code blocks, bootstrap scripts, one-liner shell commands, creating regular expressions etc. More often than not, I've also learned new things because it ends up using something new that I didn't know about, or approaches I didn't know were possible.

I also find it's a good tool to learn about new things or topics. It's very flexible in giving you a high level summary, and then digging deeper into the specifics of something that might interest you. Summarizing articles, and long posts is also helpful.

Of course, it's not always accurate, and it doesn't always work. But for me, it works more often than not and I find that valuable.

Like every technology, it will follow the Gartner Hype Cycle. We are definitely in the times of "everything-AI" or AI for everything - but I'm sure things will calm down and people will find it valuable for a number of specific things.

Erotic Roleplay. You're welcome?

It's great at summarization and translations.

It helps when writing a lot of boilerplate or if I’m being lazy and want to solve something. However I do not need AI in everything I use. It seems everyone wants AI in their product whilst it’s doing the same thing everyone else is doing.

You know those people who have no creative skills or drive, but want to be thought of as a creative?

You know those people who have this really neat idea for an app, but they don't plan on making it themself because they're "just an ideas guy"?

You know those people who will offer to pay in exposure? I mean, do you really need to be paid just to draw some pictures anyway?

You know those guys who send you a picture they got from google images and claim this to be a girl they know?

That's the vast majority of the AI audience. I could probably sum that up with the word "parasite", but I wanted to be thorough.