I know the party line is to hate AI but y'all are simply wrong about this.
I will say that without capitalism, these language learning models would be great.
While I am (rightfully) not allowed to use ChatGPT to cheat during my degree, I am allowed to use it to help with my studies. Sometimes I can ask it about a term,concept or definition I'm having trouble understanding that my teacher doesn't have time to explain to me and it really helps being able to have a study tool that I can direct to mesh with my learning style. Under communism and heavily regulated, I could see such tools helping people expand their intelligence greatly.
Too bad under capitalism it will be used to generate Marvel Movies and cheap asset flip games instead.
I use it to help punch up bids for plumbing work. Ive had it flat out write whole bids for me and to be brutally honest, it does pretty fucken good too. I use it for meal recipes, meal planning.
Its fine.
Could you please tell me more about how you use it for this purpose?
My husband does small engine repair, and I'm curious if this could help him at all. Probably not, since the repairs are so individualized to each machine, but maybe there's something you're doing that we could learn from.
Its probably likely to not be as good a fit for your husband if he has individualized parts, repair methods, etc that need to be listed in a proposal. Your husband cant really substitute one part for another, but i do it all the time when plumbing so listing individual fittings up front isnt really done.
Mine usually begins with ‘help me write a proposal to tunnel X feet under a home and repair (insert suspected broken fitting/fittings)’ . After the first bid gets spit back, ill edit it, ‘change the price for XYZ to ABC and update it’, or mostly changing terms/definitions or verbiage.
Because its more of a general ‘i need to dig to X location, fix the problem, and follow all relevant codes and best practices’ it works out well for me. Im fairly good at what i do, so i can get a pretty good idea for how something is plumbed underground, but until youre actually getting the pipe exposed and putting hands on what is there, its guessing. Educated guessing based on experience, testing, and what the camera shows, but its still guesses, end of the day.
There is a part of chatgpt where it can remember things youve told it in the past. That comes in handy when referencing specific engineers i use, or local code authorities, etc, but that took some time to enter names, associations, etc.
My final bill/invoice is the more tedious one because that includes engineers reports (if applicable, esp when tunneling under a home), individual fittings/parts/items/lengths of pipe used, photos of found versus repaired. chatgpt is of no use there, no matter how bad i want it to be.
Its probably likely to not be as good a fit for your husband if he has individualized parts, repair methods, etc that need to be listed in a proposal.
This was the conclusion that we came to last spring when we started looking at it (because we were urged by some Business Incubator types who were convinced it was going to revolutionize all roles in all industries 🙄😂), but I had had this little lingering foubt that maybe we had just misunderstood it or not tried the right way.
Your explanation of your process perfectly demonstrates that it wouldn't be at all similarly applicable for us, our use cases are wildly different. Thank you for taking the time.
This makes me see some ways it could help me with some home improvement tasks I've been procrastinating, help that I had never even considered seeking, so that's super cool to know.
Eh, it's pure novelty value. I've yet to have one give me answers that were really useful or even correct. They're all trained to have garbage politics. It's crypto again, but even more wasteful and destructive.
On the bright side, they're actively ruining the Internet, which will probably be a net positive for humanity in the long run.
Instead of being on it 24/7 as our default mode of being, it'll be so polluted with the lowest rent spam garbage that if you want to be on there you'll have to really want to be on there. Like Usenet today.
Imagine being a materialist and hating the tendency for the rate of profit to decline from commodity overproduction and accumulation.
chatgpt is good for helping creative processes. i used it earlier today to come up with some name combos that had symbolic meaning, cos im shit at that sorta thing, and it was useful even if i had to do further research to get what i actually wanted
it is not good at replacing the work of actual people, and has made a lot of things on the internet unusable
it also can churn out genuinely harmful conspiracy nonsense and misinformation if you prompt it right, it starts the message with "oh no that's sooo bad and problematic don't do that but here you go:" then gives you 5 paragraphs.which uh. is a bit reckless, at the very least.
chatgpt is good for helping creative processes. i used it earlier today to come up with some name combos that had symbolic meaning
I asked GPT to give me some ideas for a character background in DnD, I got this:
Showlol
yea that's why it's a helpful starting point and can't do whole processes by itself. it's fucking stupid a lot of the time
LLMs really are a useful tool, especially those like Perplexity search and Kagi Assistant (paid but cool) that have access to live web results or your documents. Getting a quick summary of the content of the results complete with references is great.
It's also very nice for coming up with quick outlines or lists of options. For example, I had a UX user interview, and I asked a LLM to generate a list of questions based on the user's profile and the website I'm working on. I wrote my list first and compared it to the generated list (which was better organized), coming up with a finished list that I felt very confident about.
I do think it's good for writing, too, just not in the way most people think. The folks behind IA Writer wrote a great post about using it to think more about your writing and gain another perspective. For someone like me who haaaaaaaaates bothering anyone about anything ever, having an always-available "partner" that will happily answer an infinite number of questions, deliver harsh and challenging evaluations, or brainstorm an endless number of things is incredible.
The real magic of this stuff, though, is just messing around. Stuff that you'd never take the effort to write or draw or commission but that it'd be amusing to see or read. If someone mentions that a Twitter post sounds like a poor Dennis Miller impression, I can ask a LLM for its take on a trite Miller-style monologue complete with lazy, shoehorned historical references. (Verdict: mostly accurate but too clever with similes.) And with image generators, if someone says "salm dunk" and it makes me imagine a salmon dunking a basketball, I can ask the computer to hallucinate it, and there it is right in front of my eyes, brilliant and colorful and usually weird in an unexpected day.
Was any of this productive? Did it add to anyone's bottom line? Did it need to exist? No. But the computer did a stupid magic trick and made me laugh, so it was good.
We carve micro-patterns into rocks to make them think, and now they can be funny too
I agree. And anyone hating on AI art is simply a petty-bourgeois fascist who can’t handle their exclusive craft being available to the masses.
im kinda mixed on this. its good for certain tasks, ive made scripts and smaller programs with it but its not a replacement for humans or human creativity and shouldnt be treated as such. of course, this is capitalism so...
example
i asked it to make a script to scrape all my comments on hexbear and write to a file, it did it without issues as the json structure was provided.
example 2
i asked it to make a script to allow me to hide posts on hexbear/lemmy and it came up with a working one after 2-3 iterations
spoiler
// ==UserScript== // @name Hexbear Hide Posts // @namespace http://tampermonkey.net/ // @version 1.0 // @description Hide posts on hexbear.net and store their state in local storage // @author You // @match https://hexbear.net/* // @grant none // @run-at document-end // ==/UserScript==
(function() { 'use strict';
// Function to create and return a 'Hide' button element function createHideButton(postHref) { let btn = document.createElement('button'); btn.innerHTML = 'Hide'; btn.className = 'btn btn-sm btn-link btn-animate text-muted py-0'; btn.style.marginLeft = '5px'; btn.addEventListener('click', function () { // Find the closest post container to the button clicked const postElement = this.closest('div.post-listing') || this.closest('article'); if (postElement) { hidePost(postElement, postHref); } }); return btn; } // Function to hide the post and save its href in local storage function hidePost(postElement, postHref) { postElement.style.display = 'none'; // Hide the post localStorage.setItem('hidden-' + postHref, 'true'); // Mark the post as hidden in local storage } // Function to process and potentially hide a post function processPost(post) { // Use the href attribute of the first anchor tag within the post as a unique identifier const postHref = post.querySelector('a').getAttribute('href'); // Check if the post is already marked as hidden in local storage if (localStorage.getItem('hidden-' + postHref) === 'true') { post.style.display = 'none'; // Hide the post if it was previously hidden } // Find the dropdown button to insert the 'Hide' button after const dropdown = post.querySelector('[data-bs-toggle="dropdown"]'); if (dropdown) { const hideButton = createHideButton(postHref); dropdown.parentNode.insertBefore(hideButton, dropdown.nextSibling); } } // MutationObserver callback to watch for changes in the DOM const observerCallback = (mutationsList, observer) => { for (const mutation of mutationsList) { if (mutation.type === 'childList' && mutation.addedNodes.length > 0) { mutation.addedNodes.forEach(node => { if (node.nodeType === Node.ELEMENT_NODE) { // Check if the added node is a post container if (node.matches('div.post-listing, article.post-container')) { processPost(node); } else { // Check if any child nodes are post containers const postNodes = node.querySelectorAll('div.post-listing, article.post-container'); postNodes.forEach(processPost); } } }); } } }; // Set up the MutationObserver to watch for changes in the entire document const observer = new MutationObserver(observerCallback); const config = { childList: true, subtree: true }; // Start observing the document observer.observe(document.documentElement, config); // Additionally, process any posts that are already in the DOM at script start document.querySelectorAll('div.post-listing, article.post-container').forEach(processPost);
})();
i think for creative tasks like writing, relying on LLMs entirely is just lazy and you can see that with AI Content farms on youtube.
there's only one use case for AI that I currently support, and that is as some kind of search engine assistant, as is the case with the AI in Bing, and that's really depressing... the internet is so shitty that we have to ask the shittificator tool to make it less shitty for a split second
I searched a medical thing on Bing and it added an generated search result that spliced together text from multiple websites to say literally the opposite of what was true. Such garbage, and dangerous.
yeah my experience with all of these so far has been that I have to double-check literally everything it tells me. and then, what's the point? I wind up having to do the research anyway
I've asked basic things that a search engine should be able to handle, like "what are some songs that use <x> chord progression in C major?" and gotten back wrong answers, with citations to links that didn't say what it said they said
I remember when cleverbot was big. I spent a lot of time playing around with it and don't remember any outage against it. I don't think anyone was writing papers or coding stuff with cleverbot though
Cleverbot could barely hold a coherent conversation... good times.
I tried it again just now and it still sucks, but now it's nostalgic 😊
This reminds me of something I need to post about AI and accessibility tools. Thanks!