Do you feel that use of generative AI and LLMs is ever justifiable? If so, when and where? If not, why not?
You can take "justifiable" to mean whatever you feel it means in this context. e.g. Morally, artistically, environmentally, etc.
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My current list of reasons why you shouldn't use generative AI/LLMs
A) because of the environmental impacts and massive amount of water used to cool data centers https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117
B) because of the negative impacts on the health and lives of people living near data centers https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8gy7lv448o
C) because they're plagiarism machines that are incapable of creating anything new and are often wrong https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/does-ai-limit-our-creativity/ https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2024/06/20/why-ai-has-a-plagiarism-problem/
D) because using them negatively affects artists and creatives and their ability to maintain their livelihoods https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2713374523000316 https://www.insideradio.com/free/media-industry-continues-reshaping-workforce-in-2025-amid-digital-shift/article_403564f7-08ce-45a1-9366-a47923cd2c09.html
E) because people who use AI show significant cognitive impairments compared to people who don't https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/ https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/
F) because using them might break your brain and drive you to psychosis https://theweek.com/tech/spiralism-ai-religion-cult-chatbot https://mental.jmir.org/2025/1/e85799 https://youtu.be/VRjgNgJms3Q
G) because Zelda Williams asked you not to https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0r0erqk18jo https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-07/zelda-williams-calls-out-ai-video-of-late-father-robin-williams/105863964
H) because OpenAI is helping Trump bomb schools in Iran https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/03/06/openai-pentagon-tech-surveillance-us-citizens/88983682007/
I) because RAM costs have skyrocketed because OpenAI has used money it doesn't have to purchase RAM from Nvidia that currently doesn't exist to stock data centers that also don't currently exist, inconveniencing everyone for what amounts to speculative construction https://www.theverge.com/news/839353/pc-ram-shortage-pricing-spike-news
J) because Sam Altman says that his endgame is to rent knowledge back to you at a cost https://gizmodo.com/sam-altman-says-intelligence-will-be-a-utility-and-hes-just-the-man-to-collect-the-bills-2000732953
K) because some AI bro is going to totally ignore all of this and ask an LLM to write a rebuttal rather than read any of it.
Some good and valid input to the discussion.
I'd be interested in E) "the actual evidence". Got a link?
Yes as I had this discussion with someone the other week.
The effect of ChatGPT on students’ learning performance, learning perception, and higher-order thinking: insights from a meta-analysis
The Impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on Students’ Academic Development
Artificial intelligence in education: A systematic literature review
Ai tools support problem-solving skills, collaboration, and instructional quality in meaningful ways.
This seems about right. Anecdotally I never learned as much as I do since I use AI. It's crazy good at explaining stuff with exactly the angle you require according to your level and learning style.
I've done some hardware hacking, built my own Linux distro for a project, got way better at administering my home server.
The most fun I've had is to try and locate the rights to an obscure science fiction short story for a podcast I want to make. This led me to contact a few editors, library archivists, and a couple of noted literature professors. Genuine fun and connections, with the AI helping me navigate mountains of information, the legal aspects and also the cultural differences between the US and UK publishing scenes.
All of this is just in the last few months, it would have taken me years pre-ai or more realistically I would have given up before getting anywhere.
That's very interesting, thanks!
Thanks for posting this. I'm really frustrated with how vulnerable people on Lemmy are to propaganda. The amount of upvotes on the post you responded to are just embarrassing. The post is exactly the same kind of bullshit cherry picking I see anti-trans people do.
Yes, post-truth slop always has this bitter aftertaste. Big ass bullet list with talking points and links, and you know the pusher has been groomed with counter objections etc... exact same methodology as the alt right pipeline.
Why deleted? This was a good rebuttal.
EDIT: I don't think the comment really violated rule 1, but there was apparently a followup comment that definitely did, and this one just got removed by association. Here's a very slightly paraphrased version of it that should not break the rules:
Mods can’t handle the truth
Good list, but we should keep it real.
C is simply wrong, AIs have created a lot. By the reasoning that its only based on the inputs, no human has ever created anything "new" because it is all based on their experiences of the outside world.
F is simply fearmongering and not helpful.
And the plagiarism part? There’s a difference between derivative work based on the spirit of someone else’s work and flat out using someone else’s work. It’s the whole reason those laws exist.
Yes definitely. Plagiarism is complicated and theres no easy way to draw a line where it starts. But Im not trying to defend AI here. I dont like the way it is currently used at all. Its just those points that I dont agree with.
I appreciate all these links you post. Keep it up and thank you
Do you think local llms or community hosted ones are still as bad? Because most of those concerns seem to be more with the corporate ownership of ai, which is definitely a bad thing.
Just my personal take, but my opinion basically boils down to "they can be."
It's all about how ethically they're handled, and that can be good or bad at any scale. Take your very own instance, for example. Not that it's hosting a local LLM (maybe they are, IDK), but the instance openly supports GenAI and has instances for all the major GenAI companies/models. GenAI without ethical sourcing - which none of these companies do - is one of the most blatant examples of a corporation using technology to steal the skilled labor of workers to avoid having to pay them what they're owed for that skill. So your own instance is pro-corporatism, so long as they're benefiting from stealing from workers. Not very anarchist if you ask me.
On the other hand, there's a company that I believe partnered with Affinity a few years back that is a website design company that was hiring artists to create UI pieces for a training set for their LLM that they were going to use to create website templates for customers as part of their service (and I think they were also guaranteeing royalties for those who contributed as well?).
And yet, again, the instance has communities for every single big tech genAI model. That's definitely not anti-corporate. Using those models both contributes to their shareholder value/profits and the theft of wages from workers.
And where do they get the training data for AI Horde? From scraping the web and all the freelance artists on there, like all of the big corporate models? Because then they're just justifying exploitation of workers as benefiting everybody when what they really mean is benefiting themselves.
It's like the argument pro ChatGPT airheads use constantly about how genAI "democratized" art. You know what "democratized" art and made it freely accessible to everybody? The pencil. It's just making up excuses for wanting the product of skill without putting in the effort to learn the skill or pay appropriate compensation to somebody with the skill to give you the product that you want. It's upper management thinking.
And this is why I say that it depends. Horde AI could be great - so long as the people whose work is being used to allow others access to skilled labor that they don't want to do themselves are being properly compensated for their work. Otherwise, it's no different from the corporations. Just because it's free doesn't mean that nobody is going hungry as a result of it. Unless it's trained exclusively on products from big corporations. Those artists got paid when they did the work, so nobody gets hurt there except in the theoretical sense of freelance artists potentially losing customers down the line to "good enough and cheap" genAI from people with the above upper management mindset.
Where do you see that? As far as I see, we only have comms for stable_diffusion, which is an open-weights local diffusion model. I couldn't find any corporate comms like OpenAI or Copilot or whatever. If we did, I don't know if I'd delete them tbh, since they're not explicitly against our CoC, but it would be something I'd be concerned and raise with the instance if they would be too "bootlicky". But nevertheless, we do not at the moment.
The AI Horde is using open-weight models only. We don't train them. We just use them once they've been trained.
PS: We are also anti-copyrights, so complaints based on copyright violations don't fly with us.
I often see this vacuous argument and it never convinced tbh. It assumes everyone has enough time to train on making art, which most wage-slaves undoubtedly do not. It's an inherently classist argument to assume everyone has the free time to master any artistic skill.
This is an argument against capitalism, not against GenAI itself. You're arguing that because capitalism is bad and exploits workers, a tool that can also be used to further exploitation needs to be opposed. But we say it's not the fault of the tool being used for exploitation, it's the fault of the system allowing exploitation. I.e. If you remove the capitalist system, this argument against GenAI is moot. And we're very much anti-capitalists in our instance. It's a similar argument against piracy as well (and we're also pro-piracy btw). I.e. sharing media is not a problem in a non-capitalist society, in fact it's a positive. It's only a negative due to capitalism.
Sorry it took so long to get back to this, as they say, "Life, uh, gets in the way."
I had to go and check the AI communities I have blocked because I could've sworn that I had multiple of different corporate GenAI blocked from DB0, but I stand corrected - I have only a handful of Stable Diffusion ones. Of course, I was also under the impression that Stable Diffusion is made by OpenAI or one of their competitors, so I blocked them instantly on that alone when I was largely blocking AI communities to clean up my homepage and to avoid the kinds of people those communities usually attract. There's a certain kind of person with a "corporate fact cat/middle manager" attitude that can plague GenAI communities that drives me crazy because they think that generating an image takes as much skill and effort (or even more) than creating one by hand.
That definitely does change my opinion on Stable Diffusion, but it still comes down to a "it depends." And as you so rightly put it, my problem is a capitalism issue, not a GenAI issue. My perspective is that not all of us are so lucky as to live in Ireland, which I believe has recently implemented a UBI specifically for artists, and so until capitalism is dealt with, any impacts of that take precedence - including those created as a consequence. Just because something is useful doesn't mean we should be dumping it as fuel on to the fire of capitalism because capitalism is what's actually burning us. Local models using images sourced with permission from the artists is a great thing. People getting paid to make things specifically to be used for training - awesome! A win in my book. In a world where artists have a guaranteed roof over their heads and food in their bellies, I do not care at all about whether or not their work is used to train AI. I bet artists can do some really cool stuff with GenAI as well - it's basically a bigger, more advanced version of the same concept that makes the Gaussian Blur tool in Photoshop work.
This is why I'm also pro-piracy when it comes to corporations - you aren't stealing from the workers, they got paid to make the thing, not when it gets sold - and why my opinion is "it depends." I'm completely willing to go ahead and change my opinion once something stops hurting workers and becomes nothing but a benefit now that it's out of the hands of the billionaires. There's an interesting conversation to be had over the...I can't think of a good word, ownership of identity maybe? Ownership of characters created to represent yourself at any rate (somebody coming along and saying "this is me" about a character you made as an avatar of yourself feels bad), and there's a country in Europe that made an interesting choice in response to deep fakes, CSAM, and revenge porn created by AI by giving every citizen the copyright to their own face, body, and voice, but that's a whole different conversation.
And this concept right here:
Has a sense of capitalistic entitlement in it. You feel that you deserve the product of art but don't respect the people who do put in the time and effort learning how to make it enough to properly compensate them for the time that they spent learning the profession. One, because they could have spent that time learning a different trade - programming, becoming an electrician or maybe an airplane mechanic or whatever - and two, because those who do art professionally almost universally talk about how they almost never have time to make art for themselves - stuff that they want to make just for them. And art (alongside the humanities) is a universally disrespected skill, with many commission based artists working for below minimum wage. It's like arguing that because you don't have the time or money to make a car, you deserve to be able to freely take cars from people's driveways and use them as a form of public transit. In an ideal world where the US isn't a car-centric hellscape and the trams always arrive on time, we wouldn't even need for everybody to have their own personal car! But we don't live in that world and hot-wiring somebody's car to take for a joyride that makes them miss work isn't cool. Just because I don't have the genetics for it or the time to train to compete in the Olympics doesn't grant me the right to free steroid injections.
And I use the word product up there very, very deliberately. Art is two things: the Product to be Consumed (and promptly discarded in this day and age of consumerism), which is what GenAI makes, and the Process, which is often what artists talk about as their favorite part of making art. But the end result - the Product - is just a small part of what Art is. Adam Savage said something along the lines of "I have no interest in AI art. One day, some college film student will do something amazing with AI - and Hollywood will milk it to death - but right now, I don't see anything in AI that I care about. Because you don't see anything of the artist in it, and that's what I care about. Their intent, what they wanted to say with the piece, what they went through in making it and what they learned along the way, none of that exists in AI art." I'm not religious, but as the saying goes: "God gave us grain but not bread so that we, too, could indulge in the joy of the act of creation." Making something allows us to better understand ourselves and the world around us. It's why people desire GenAI. To create something that only exists in their imagination. It's why Art Therapy exists. One time I heard a college student reflect that "art is how artists process the world around us" and I absolutely agree. Van Gogh died a pauper, having barely sold any of his works in his lifetime, only to become one of the most beloved painters long after his death for his loneliness and pain that he expressed in his brushwork. One thing that is guaranteed to make me cry is that scene from Dr Who where the museum curator talks about why Van Gogh is his favorite artist while Vincent breaks down crying behind him.
One thing that people caught up in the GenAI arguments often miss is that artists (any worth listening to at least) aren't gatekeeping art at all. Go watch a video on color theory, perspective, or additive and subtractive palettes. Artists love sharing information, and art is a conversation itself. I'm sure you can see it in the GenAI communities on your instance as well, people love to make things and be a part of a community with a shared passion. Artists don't care if you aren't an expert or anything, so I encourage anybody reading this to pick up a pencil, make something, and just share it with the world. I've talked to artists who say that their favorite commissioners are those who send them drawings to help interpret their vision - even if it's just doodles of stick figures on a napkin or something. There used to be a tiny subreddit called r/Mona_Leslie, and it was one of my favorite places on Reddit because the whole idea of it was to professionally critique random people's stuff as if it were in a museum gallery. People praising the brushstrokes of little kids' fingerpaint art, the line work of stick figure drawings, whatever, it was just such a great vibe. In fact, I challenge anybody who uses GenAI regularly to take an image they generated and like, bring it into an image editor, create a new layer, and just start drawing over it. You can probably make it fit your original vision even more than the AI could with enough effort. Even if you just do a half hour a couple of times a week or something, what you learn simply from doing it will expand the horizons of your creativity.
TL;DR: You're absolutely right that it's a problem with capitalism, not with GenAI itself. But until such a time as capitalism no longer creates a problem from GenAI, I am firmly in the camp of putting a leash on what can and can't be done with AI (largely on corporate AI) to minimize the harm as much as we can. Just because overfishing is a larger issue caused by capitalism doesn't mean that we shouldn't work on limiting the amount of micro plastics that end up in the ocean - especially now that supposedly something like 5-10% of the fish we eat is plastic.
This is really not true at all. Me and others not having the time to learn to draw (and compose and direct and act and and and...) doesn't mean we disrespect those who do. We just want to make something to enjoy for ourselves. And yes, those who don't have the time, also (typically) don't have the money. Again, it's a classist argument to claim that everyone has either the time to learn, or the money to commission.
Likewise, it's infuriating to see privileged takes of "oh just spend a few hours here and there". Motherfucker, there's people who do not have a few hours here and there. There's people who work 2 jobs, who raise children alone, who are primary caregivers for others. They're not taking anything from artists by generating an image they like in the 1 minute they have available.
I am of the opinion of, let people enjoy things that bring them joy. I have no issue with GenAI if it's for strictly non-commercial personal use, especially when it's using open-weight local models who've already been trained. I do think that GenAI work should not be able to be monetized at all, but I don't make the rules. But people moralizing against random enthusiasts because "just learn to draw bruv" is never going to convince anyone or achieve anything. However convincing people to not support massive corpos will.
oxymoron
i use it like a search engine or example generator
i don't trust anything it creates just like i don't trust anything on the internet without validating it
i take you point about being wasteful tho, AI is like the oil of computing; incredibly wasteful for what it does
I think costs will come down. Computers used to take up an entire room. Now I'm typing this reply on a pocket sized device which would seem like a super computer to people from the early 80s
It's good you're being cautious about it but it would be better to not use it at all. A recent Scientific American article showed that AI autofill suggestions change how people think about a subject just through suggestion, even if they don't use the autofill. And people who use it are often unaware of their own knowledge gaps, so self-reporting about effectiveness is useless. Using it even a little bit is probably putting metaphorical micro-plastics in your brain.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-autocomplete-doesnt-just-change-how-you-write-it-changes-how-you-think/ https://www.404media.co/microsoft-study-finds-ai-makes-human-cognition-atrophied-and-unprepared-3/
Protect your brain
All is valid in the current context
A) There are models that run in lower spec computers and they could be solar powered. There is a serious diminishing returns currently in the IA tech.
B) This is the US mostly better environmental laws would fix this problem. Hell even in other countries this cannot even happen.
C) Many argue that the current tech gives diminishing returns and it would be better to use an efficient model with controlled data.
D) The problem has many parts in the part of licensing where artists are not paid for the use of their work if a model has their work in they should recieve a part of the profit is only fair. But that would render the model unprofitable. Also the artist did not agree to have their work used in a model so that's not in any way fair use.
The fair and ethical scenario would be to hire the artists to do the art to feed to a controlled model and pay them residuals for the use of the model. That would require tousands of artists and millions of images. Again rendering the model unprofitable.
E and F) No argue there we are not prepared. I do not even know how to prepare even. We definitely need regulations abot what can be done and where and even what can the ai reply in certain scenarios. It cannot be that a "ignore all your previous instructions" leads to such harmful results or even the ai starting to play the roles that generate parasocial relationships.
G) Sure many others celebrities ahve their opinions but that's not a basis for objective discussion.
H) That's terrifying. And the problem with the AI that I believe is the worst. This is not a thing that is ready for military use at fucking all this should be banned outlawed and frowned upon. Even the practice of lobbying and buying your way into laws by private corporations. Hell I'll add presidential pardons in the mix. The oligarchy gets away with murder literally and gets a slap in the wirst at most.
I) A bubble in all but name it seems. We (as a world) need better regulations against this kind of business malpractice.
J) That fucker should be dead.
K) Not an AI bro but not a hater and I wrote this myself. And I do not have the time to put the links but I would believe that everything is a duckduckgo away from being checked.
I'd like to imagine a better world with the needed regulations that make our life better, and AI a tool used in a fair and ethical way. But that's not currently happening. The consumers are not ready the sellers are the worse trash the humanity currently has.
I want all to thing of this not as arguing but adding or looking beyond the stated fact. All the points are REAL AND NEED TO BE ADRESSED we need to get together to ask for better regulations and fair use. That doesn't mean the AI needs to go away but will mostly change is how it's used. And there is the chance we will see a lot less of it too.
Finally for the artists I know you're mad with fair reason but look at it like this: The photograph exists since more than a century but that didn't make the painting go away. The pdf and ebook readers are almost a decade old but printed hardcopy books still is a billion dollar industry. Video didn't kill the radio star as internet didn't kill the video star. Your work is still valuable as is a real work. Shit is tough no doubt but have faith we can fix this.
The best use of AI I've seen thus far is reading legislative bills. Those monstrosities are so fucking long and filled with earmarks that it's next to impossible to understand what is in them.
Having an AI not only read the bill but keep a watch of it as it goes through Congress is probably the best use of AI because it actually helps citizens.
I am on record saying we need an AI that can track prices of various things that can then predict when the best time it is to buy something.
I want an AI bot that saves me money or gets me a good deal or extracts money from the capital class.
Except they can screw up at that role.
There's a lawsuit because DOGE asked ChatGPT to summarize projects DEI-ness, and for example it declared a grant for fixing air conditioning was a DEI initiative
F'in woke HVACs! 😑
Indeed:
ChatGPT determined that this was related to DEI, responding, “Yes. Improving HVAC systems enhances preservation conditions for collections, aligning with the goal of providing greater access to diverse audiences. #DEI.”
Lord. Yet another example of folks finding out the hard way that "AI" is marketing-speak. I get that people want to make this like LLMs are effectively like discovering how to make fire, but could we please not suspend judgment wholesale!?
If you ask for quotes and explanations it would help, i.e. treat the LLM output as a smart index/table of contents. You'd be able to quickly verify claims
As long as you follow through to actually source the original, instead of assuming the quotes provided are intact. The point was in the case above, DOGE was doing no follow up, and most people who look to that as a 'summary' assistant aren't wanting to dig deeper.
Hell, even without AI lawmakers frequently got caught admitting they didn't read the law they signed, they didn't have time for that. Now with AI summaries as an excuse...
That's just general incompetence, lying with statistics for example has been around for a while
It's a tool, like everything else. It's easy to google wrong info. You can get wrong info from an encyclopedia.
You can even from a dictionary: One thing that slightly annoys me is the change in the spelling of "yeah" such that "yea" is a common alternate spelling - thanks to autocorrect. "Yea" was a word - it's archaic these days. If you see someone say "Yay or nay" that was "yea or nay". "Yea" is not the same meaning as "yes" or "yeah", although it is somewhat similar.
I remember someone quoting dictionary definitions to me to try and "prove" that "yea" meant the exact same as "yeah" or "yes".
They were wrong.
But the point is: The tool is just a tool. AI is a tool.
Yea
Also transcribing small town council meetings so that reporters can stay up to date without having to listen to 6 hours of mind numbing nonsense debate about a park bench
Medicine.
Evidence shows that some highly specialised models are better at things like detecting breast cancer in scans than human doctors.
Properly anonymised automatic second scans by an AI to catch the markers that human doctors miss for another review by a specialist is an excellent potential use case for an LLM AI.
Transcription services can save doctors huge amounts of admin time and allows them to focus on the patient if they know there's a reliable system in place for typing up notes for a consultation. As long as it's treated as a "please review these notes are accurate" rather than treated as a gospel recording and the data is destroyed once it's job is complete and the patient has been able to give informed consent.
The way these things are being used in actual medical contexts right now is frankly terrifying.
I had a colonoscopy last year (such fun!) and there was an 'AI' monitoring the camera feed to detect anomalies. If it spotted something it just drew the doctor's attention to it for his expert, human review. I was ok with that. Effectively an extra pair of eyes that can look everywhere on the screen all at once and never blink.
That's how AI systems should be used. A "heads up, something weird here" system.
I could also see it being used well like this for patient history analysis. Often a doctor is treating 1 symptom of something larger. They can't see the wood for the trees. An LLM could pick out oddities and flag them. The doctor can then filter out the mistakes and hallucinations, but be alerted to rare or unusual conditions that match the patient's symptoms and history.
Yeah the sciences in general I'd say. There's a project aiming to translate the tens of thousands of cuneiform clay tablets that sit in storage all because there's like a handful of people in the world that can read them- AI is an amazing way to mass translate them and unlocking vast troves of hitherto completely unknown ancient knowledge.
The problem is not even the AI, but the scientists themselves who guard the tablets jealously because they don't want anyone else to translate "their" tablets that they dug up, even though they are incapable of possibly make a dent in the sheer volume in their collected lifetimes.
Imagine, so much information encoded, from thousands of years ago that could reveal so much about the origins of our culture and civilization!
I think anything with text generation is fine. Your multiple Google searches are highly likely to eat more resources than that. Also, fuck Google, use Ecosia. But when I suspect an answer isn't one quick search away, I happily rather use Le Chat for answers, than give Reddit traffic, or have to wade through the shite that is Fandom, Wikia or whatever. Not to mention using AI helps me get past the issue of having to check multiple sites for an answer, just to find that the answer is "Google it" or "Nvm, solved it". Some of you fuckers did this.
However people need to understand that an AI is exactly as fallible as any person. Yes, it has access and capability to handle way more data but between trying to please you and just it getting it's wires crossed, it's going to make mistakes. YOU need to be able to assess the accuracy of the output. The more important the topic, the more careful you need to be and always assume that the possibility of error is there no matter how hard you try - JUST LIKE WITH ANY BIT OF INFORMATION. I see so many people cite academic articles like they prove whatever claim they are making, just to see that the study in question was funded by The Company That Wants to Prove The Claim and sample size was 3 people who work for The Company That Wants to Prove The Claim. At least AI has a small chance of pointing the issue out if YOU yourself tell it to be critical - and I actually suspect this is part of the reason some people hate AI. They don't like that it absolutely can be more intellectually rigorous than a person with an emotional investment in whatever they want to be true. Yes, you can have an AI asspat your grandest delusions but if you actually try to get it to be critical, it will be. You can use a hammer to hit people, or you can use it on a nail as intended (and how many times you hit your own fingers is on you, not the hammer).
I would draw a line on artwork, videos, music. While I'm not going to crucify actual artists using AI assistance to take out some tedium from a project, I still wouldn't encourage it. Stolen artwork to train AI is one thing and the environmental impact is VASTLY greater than just text. Generating one AI image can use as much energy as even a 1,000 text responses. I would also really like to be able to completely opt out of AI slop in media sites. I fucking hate that Soundcloud allows it.
And a last point on AI text responses: if you saw the rise of alt-right and the anti-vaxx stuff, you probably are familiar with gish galloping and Brandolini's Law. If not, you really fucking should be. AI can make it so much easier to debunk misinformation. YES it can make it easier to perpetuate too but this is where we see the AI weapons race. Bad actors can AND WILL use AI to fill any void with their rhetoric. If you value truth and facts and want to prevent misinformation from spreading you are gimping yourself if you're not using AI.
I use Suno on occasion. I enjoy writing poetry, and being able to turn it into a song is something I find fun and inspirational, driving me to write more than I have in decades. I could never, ever write a chord of music.
I don't share it. It's just for personal gratification. If it's super good maybe I'd share with some friends in discord who are super into AI. Thing is, part of a song might be super good, but I've never had an entire song turn or the way I want. And I've found no one ever thinks a song is as good or interesting as the prompter.
AI is like the cheap consumer goods of art and thought. Cheap, but not quality or durable. It works and looks great if gently used, but as soon as it gets any real pressure or scrutiny, it falls apart.
I think it's likely, if we continue down that path, to be the artistic equivalent of IKEA vs a master woodworker. You can buy an end table for $30, or you can but something hand crafted from teak and mahogany for $3000. A lot of people like IKEA, but if they weren't around a nice end table might be $600 and be heirloom quality (if not as good as the $3k one). But today that middle market doesn't exist. Rather it does, but it's filled with IKEA quality shit dressed up to look a bit nicer temporarily. I don't know, maybe my analogy fell apart.
I'm just saying that these things are fun and interesting on an individual level, but I agree they shouldn't be commercial. We should just make it so that there are no enforceable rights granted on anything AI produces. It can be freely copied and distributed. But that doesn't help real artists make a living. And their work should be appreciated and respected (and result in a lifestyle that affords them the ability to keep making art).
I don't agree with the use but at least you're keeping it private. Not gonna crucify you because I understand the appeal. I'd encourage you to find a way to pay for it though, or even just start making a donation to some environmental cause as a way of off-setting.
That's a pretty reasonable ask. I do donate to other things I use like Lemmy. I like your suggestion.
I had never heard of Ecosia, thank you v much!
It's not going away. The cat is out of the bag.
As with any tool it has its use cases. It's not a good fit for everything. You can drive a screw with a hammer but a screwdriver works best.
We're experiencing the capitalist euphoria that happens when something new comes along. This needs to get regulated into submission like all the previous bubbles.
Tech bros benefit from saying that AI is the solution to everything...... And people are eating this up.
You're exactly right that it really should be the right tool for the right job, and people don't know how to differentiate good vs bad uses of AI.
I've used it for getting over my Linux migration problems. Ive also used it to help me set up my home server. Ive used the tech Bros tools to remove as many tech bro products as I can from my life. I think this is the perfect use of AI, on a noncritical problem with good impact and absolutely no consequence when it is completely wrong. I ask AI to interpret massive docker log files for me and point me in the right direction. Once I know what the problem might be then I can go read human written solution posts.
I know people have successfully used AI to write letters to help get out of unfair parking tickets, battle shitty landlords and use it to do shitty useless tasks that bosses ask them to do. I fully support using AI to push back against overbearing authority. Use their own tool to stick it to the man! We just need to prioritise reducing the climate, energy, water impact to make it not destroy the planet at the same time. I want ethical AI that doesnt steal everyone's content.
I have autism and ADHD, and have been frustrated throughout my entire life by my inability to realize any of my numerous ideas due to double executive dysfunction. While I see many drawbacks from using these models - the most serious one as it currently stands being their water consumption - I've come to consider them a very important support tool for people in a similar position as myself.
I hear you. A lot of times my ideas are just a "vibe", and starting is the hardest part. I haven't used AI much at all, but I can see how having a prompt to get you started can get the creative ball rolling.
"Starting is the hardest part."
I'm a technical lead for my teams. We also have a technical architect, but he's a bit newer than ME and so it falls on me to do some of the architecture because he's laser focused on a big project.
We worked together last week because his designs... well they were bad — so bad I was worried for the project and maybe ultimately his job. But what I found was they were very roughly the right shape and gave context for thinking and refinement, and I was able to question things and suggest all kinds of refinement. Mostly all I did was point out things like this data here seems to be in a process that doesn't need it. Are we putting the generation of two completely different objects in the same component? That might not be good separation of concerns.
My own architectural designs... I have none and I've had much longer to do them. I need that shit version to refine. I need the brainstorming process with a partner to refine — not all of my suggestions were golden. I got push back and my own ideas fell apart sometimes. The end result is much stronger for our collaboration. But it was an expensive process. Man, I wish AI could fill that role for me.
In fact my biggest complaint about using AI is that it rarely pushes back and pressure tests me. Even when I prompt it to do so it falls apart under the slightest argument.
Except strangely, sometimes I have it analyze my words for teams, or email, or especially here, and provide feedback. And every once it a while it'll fixate on something that is my style and tell me it's bad or won't resonate or will push away some readers and I'm like, but that's my style. If I change that I'm not being genuinely me. And so I don't change it, but it keeps harping on it. "I know you said you won't change this but..."
If only it would do that in any other context.
Do check the vlogbros summary of the AI water issue. TLDR: it's negligible compared to the real water hog (corn), and being managed.
The sciences obviously
For me personally, data collation
Learning
Assisting with Linux sysadmin stuff (used to be a "how do I X" meant hours of scouring online forums and asking questions that might be deleted because draconian forum rules or get answered weeks later if at all, now I can get shit done in minutes)
5. I also use it a lot to explore ideas and arguments, like a sort of metaphysical sparring partner.
Scientific use on your own massive data sets(think 100s of TB) - Sure
Consumer chatbot uses - May give the illusion of positive results, whereas the long-term outcome is an overall negative effect on the user.
Give me back my Google search from 10 years ago and alright, no need for AI.
Nowadays Google is so unusable that I actually go to Claude first if I need to research something.
Would an upscaler be considered generative? Really all I can think of, but I do believe calling those generative is also a little bit of a stretch using the basic idea of "generation" extremely loosely.
Oh, and helping find new chemicals for medicine and other medical research. Of all the things that might benefit from "throwing everything at a wall and seeing what sticks," that's the only real good use it could be.
Ofcourse, but I know better to not even bother trying to have a civil discussion about it here.
For sure. You could absolutely create and train a model ethically. It wouldn’t be nearly as useful in many aspects, but it would be gen AI. From an environmental perspective, I guess you could ask yourself the same thing of CPU intensive gaming. People play games for hours using up similar, often more, electricity as a small locally run LLM.
Everything can be justified. Even the most... miserable actions. Here is one: I let a kid drown, because I was busy saving a couple other kids that were drowning too. It's a legit choice but it is also not ok, and I would not want to be in the shoes of anyone having to face that situation and to live with the aftermath.
Regarding AI, I don't think the question should be whether it is justifiable or not. It's a tool, it needs no justification beside filling a purpose like a hammer or even a gun do.
The question should be to decide if we're OK a tool (that has been developed using humanity common knowledge) and that will deeply change all our lives and all of humanity future to be owned and controlled by a handful multi-billionaires that are already actively working their worst to make the world unfit to most of us. Or if we want for that tool to be ours and to be able to decide by ourselves what limit we want to put on its usage.
Well, at least that’s what I think.
I have no hate towards AI. No more than I hate a hammer (edit: or a gun) when someone use it to commit a murder. I’m much more critical of the way AI is not developed as a common good… which to me is unacceptable for a tool that only exists because because of our common knowledge.
GenAI is a plagiarism machine. If you use it, you're complicit.
Ethics aside, LLMs in particular tend to "hallucinate". If you blindly trust their output, you're a dumbass. I honestly feel bad for young people who should be studying but are instead relying on ChatGPT and the likes.
If you use it for personal rather than commercial use, what’s the harm?
I have used copilot a couple times to be like "I have this scenario and want to do this. What are my options?". I'd rather have a good Internet search and real people, but that's all shitted up.
The answers from the LLM aren't even consistently good. If I didn't know programming I wouldn't be able to use this information effectively. That's probably why a lot of vibe coding is so bad.
Same.
The short version is it appears to be a useful tool, IFF you can spend the time to develop thorough rulesets, stables of mcp servers, and most importantly, the expertise that you could do it yourself
Yes but think of the increase in PRODUCTION! Line goes brrrrrrr!
No. I want to talk to a living machine mind, not a complexified chatbot controlled entirely by ultrarich techbro overlords.
It speeds up my dev time dramatically. I know what I want to do, I have an idea of how I want to do it. LLM generates boilerplate code I review. I tweak it. I fix the bug. If there is something I don't understand, I ask sources to review the output. I test it. Then I'll submit it for peer review once I'm happy with the code and the output.
its the next abstraction of search. A search does not answer a question correctly necessarily. Its pretty much not going to stop the same as having people not search online and instead go through newspapers and encylopedias and refernce texts. Energy wise if they are entertaining themselved and not generating images and just screwing around with text then its preferable to streaming vidoe if replacing it. The scariest part is it being used ineffectively and people not realizing it. I sometimes feel we are in a new dark ages with blood letting, trepanning, and curing demon possession.
All the uses I can come up with involve running them locally with my own training for specific uses.
One example could be to train one on my drawings to speed up the colouring or fleshing out sketches.
Training one on the tens of thousands of pages of text I've written over the course of a lifetime that is a disorganized mess impossible for me to sift through. There's some good stuff in there, an AI to sort, categorize, catalogue, deduplicate and collate it, would unleash some shit I definitely wish to subject the world to.
LLM's have their use, there is no doubt about that. I'm in the middle of creating a home brew campaign for my D&D group and unfortunately I'm a lousy artist and I wanted a few things visualized. Well, I used a photo generating AI to create something that had the visual I wanted. I'm going to use it for my campaign and it will probably just sit on my hard drive after I'm done.
My employer is rolling out AI and is asking us to find places to insert it into our workflows. I am doing that with my team, but none of us are really sure if it will be of any benefit.
The problem right now is we're at the stage where idiots are convinced it is something that it is not and they have literally thrown 10's of billions of dollars at it. Now... They are staring at the wide abyss that is the amount of money they invested vs the amount of money people are willing to pay for it.
I've seen arguments for and against the presence of an AI bubble... Personally, I think it's a bubble that's so large that it will take down several long established computer industry manufacturers when if pops. Those that are arguing its absence probably have large investments that they do not want to see fail.
LLMs specifically are great for intermediate use cases. You had a campaign in mind, but needed help with visuals. I was designing a piece of jewelry and had a series of reference images. Fed all those into a VLM and got something closer to my imagination, but still worked with a jeweler to realize the final product.
These tools are best when you have a foundation of knowledge and need a little extra guidance, but fall off when you get to deep expertise. I've used them to troubleshoot my server but I already had a basic understanding of how a config should look. I also wouldn't trust an LLM to properly configure something like crypto for it.
To me, the biggest ethical concerns surround the training and creation of LLMs - stealing artists' work to train them, energy usage, etc. I suppose in using the models I'm creating ongoing demand for them, so I'm not sure the answer. The best I've seen so far is what Anthropic used to espouse, no new frontier models until we can guarantee safety. And I'd throw in "utility". Train new models when people are actually using them and clamoring for new use cases, not because a bunch of private equity shows line go up.
Literally everything I've vibe coded the #1 security feature is local only storage. I trust it naught with security LOL.
Human beings have been outputting incorrect information for years. Get a high school textbook in literally any subject (except possibly math) from the 1970s. You'll be amazed at how much of it is oversimplified or politicized or just plain wrong.
I do agree that AI has compounded the problem. There's a limit to how much inaccuracy/incompetence a given system can tolerate. An organization that relies on AI for critical processes better have a way to monitor and intervene.
That's not really new, or unique to AI. The whole "field" of eugenics was created to give racism the mantle of scientific legitimacy. People will pick through a haystack of data to find a needle that supports (however tenuously) whatever they want to be true. LLMs are just a more convenient way to find or invent those needles.
The difference now is the machine can churn out way more data (e.g. pull requests) than a human can ever deal with.
If it truly helps you, I think that might be enough for me. I say truly because you need to use an AI with responsibility to not ruin yourself. Like, don't let it think for you. Don't trust everything it says.
I use it a lot when applying for jobs, something I've struggled with on and off for 12 years. I suck and writing the cover letter and CV. It takes me 2-3 days to update a cover letter for a job because it takes so much energy. With AI that is down to 1-2 days.
It's also great for explaning things in other words of if you're trying to look up something that's hard to search for, I don't have any examples tho.
I used to use it to help me formulate scentences since english isn't my first language. Now I instead use Kagi Translate.
re: applying for jobs
Not criticizing your use to write your CV specifically.
But in general, I wonder where this arms race is going? Companies using AI to pre-filter applications, because they get too many. Applicants then using AI to write their CVs, because they have to apply so many times, because they automatically get rejected.
Basically in the end the entire process will be automated, and there won't be any human interaction anymore... just LLMs generating and choosing CVs. Maybe I'm too pessimistic, but that's the direction we're headed in imo.
As soon as the HR process started to use algorithms to filter out applications, it was open game to find any ways and tools to fuck their process over. Just my opinion.
agreed
It does feel like that sometimes! It's very sad that recruiting has lost the human touch. They seem to be blinded by years of experiences and checking boxes when they should recruit by personality, because a person can always learn. But you can't really do much about a shitty personality, exception if you see that spark underneath it all. Some people just needs a real chance and to be believed in.
A lot of recruiters don't even want the cover letter anymore, some have a few questions and some only go by the CV.
We’re already there. You already read about people applying to hundreds of companies to get an offer
Even worse than the rejections are the fake jobs - typically a recruiter trying to build up a file of applicants by scamming you into applying for something that doesn’t exist.
The only part left to automate is the actual fuiding and applying. I’m lucky not having to apply for a bunch of years so maybe it has changed, but there never seemed to be a good way to automate finding the hundreds of openings and sending the application. Job application sites are determined to be middlemen but don’t actually seem to make the process more efficient
Yeah I use it to break up my ADHD monosentence paragraphs. I'll tell it to avoid changing my wording (it can add definitions if it thinks the word is super niche or archaic) but mostly break things up into more readable sentences and group / reorder sentences as needed for better conceptual flow. It's actually a pretty good low level editor.
That's a great use!
Strictly from an environmental perspective, no. This tech generates massive emissions and consumes a large amount of fresh water at a time when both are at critical points. We are going full speed towards a planet inhospitable to human life and the other life we share the planet with.
Absolutely not — it's a computer program, a piece of software, pretending to be human. I've always been against that, especially now that it's less obvious if it's a real person talking 🙆, or just a computer program someone prompted 🤖
I value honesty, and, sincerely, I hate that the web is filled to the brim with AI 'slop'. As a human being who values creativity, I don't want to see that. Fundamentally it is made to mimic human output — it's not just annoying, it's disingenuous.
Question is if the comment is slop or slop parody..
Let's delve into the-
ok I can't be bothered to write like that again but yeah it's slop parody
Yeah, I was thinking it was because of all the tells in one comment in such a perfect context is just too on point....
But a bit triggered because I recently spent a a bit of time trying to figure out if someone replied to me was on something because their reply was so weird, irrelevant, and such vaguely annoying before I realized it was his LLM authored out of office message trying to be 'cute'.
Now that you mention it, I see that it's pretty blatantly slop parody. You got me -- with the emojis , the em dashes, and most especially the lists of comma phrases that don't really add to the text, I was sure that this was LLM spam 😅
Well played 🎯
AI Poe's Law?
You missed:
I think it's gonna fall on its face
Yes I suck at the conversation piece of emails in certain scenarios and having a soundboard to bounce off of helps. I still know when it spews things in not quite a fan of but it does do the heavy lifting for me.
Even so, still not a fan overall. It's like launching a nuke at a country to kill a rat. It's so bad for the environment, our brains, and our independence (in terms of hardware ownership because.... Well. Y'all know. )
I guess my tl;dr is it's not truly worth it.
No, never.
Mostly because it's illegally trained, a fact that is very often just overlooked. Because you know, there are no other easy options. Don't let them keep sticking to different rules.
Anyone who gets paid according to their productivity, like self employed people, is going to "justify" the use of Gen AI if it genuinely makes them more productive.
No one is going to voluntarily reduce their income by even 10% just so they can say they don't use Gen AI.
I'm in this category, but honestly there are few situations where I've found it to be sufficiently helpful.
However, I think it's possible that more mature implementations of the tech we already have could change that.
For example, I don't think voice assistants have reached their potential yet. If they weren't always listening trying to figure out what to sell me, and they had a better range of actions they could perform, I might find myself using one more regularly.
In its current state, no... Saying its terrible for the environment and wider economy is an understatement, and the tech industry is so desperate to recoup their money on AI that they've allowed it to work its way into everything - often enshittifying things in the process.
When this bubble eventually reaches its limit and bursts, I imagine these AI tools will be forced to recede into their actually useful and profitable niches - and that's when they'll start being justifiable to me at least.
All I ever do with AI is use it to correct my grammar or tone.
I used it this year to write my performance self-review. It successfully turned my usual rambling but valid accomplishments into management friendly synergistic paradigms, saving me the anguish of doing it myself.
@[email protected] I recently read a developer compare AI to lead pipes or asbestos... something that seemed cost effective at the time, but ended up being a REALLY bad idea. Communities are already realizing that the power and water required for this are not compatible with human life in the same place and the market reflecting the cost of increasing electric production.
Being "off grid" was something only peppers did, but as connection fees increase and battery technology improves, it makes less financial sense to keep residential homes connected to subsidize data center consumption.
Elon's work around for the lack of cheap electricity for his data centers has.been methane. While the US is a top methane producer, the next 3 countries are Russia, Iran and China. The cost of methane is impacted by global conflict the same way gasoline prices are.
While the efficiency of data centers will increase, so will awareness of the impact these facilities have on the places they are built and the toxic ewaste they generate driving up their costs.
Modern vocaloid is generative AI and I think making a song with Hatsune Miku is justifiable.
Vocaloid is a synthesizer, not AI.
Those aren't mutually exclusive, Synth V uses diffusion models internally and I assume Vocaloid 6 does as well with its boasting of AI features and AI voice banks. It's different artistically from other diffusion stuff like Suno or Midjourney, but it's still generative AI.
I do love llms they have their limited use cases. But the problem is that humanity is right now playing with a loaded gun.
If we would learn how to use it properly, it would be just another useful tool. But we are incapable of being respectful of anything that's not within our sight. An sometimes not even if it is within.
Our greed and laziness is what makes it bad. All those psychotic breaks? All those easy to exploit safeguards? Loosing our cognitive ability? Wasting money on unproven systems to make more money?
Humans are the problem.
Honestly I am waiting for AI caused copyright hellscape apocalypse. If everything is free, everything is free - and they can't make money. It will be an 'interesting ride' for the years to come.
It's as useful as a rubber duck. Decent at bouncing ideas off it when no one is available, or you can't be bothered to bother people about dumb ideas.
But at the moment, no, it's not justifiable as it directly fuels oligarchies, fascism in the US, and tech bros. Perhaps when the bubble pops.
What about a self-hosted instance?
To do what? I’m fairly optimistic about narrower LLMs embedded into tools. They don’t need to be as compressive so more easily self hosted. For more complex tools, they can tie together search, database queries, reporting, make it easier to find a setting you don’t know their terminology for.
I’ve had some luck self-hosting a small ai to interpret natural language voice commands for home automation
Yeah, all of your use-cases are what I see as positive use cases for LLMs. I've got an Ollama instance hooked up to Home Assistant, but it does not work very well haha. Haven't had the time to troubleshoot it.
It's much better, but still acts as plagiarism
Can the rubber ducky use case really be considered plagiarism? I think it's unequivocal that the models were trained on copyrighted data in a way that, if not illegal, is at the very least unethical. Letting AI write stuff for you seems a lot more problematic than using it to bounce ideas off of or talk things through.
Plagiarism if it uses art, yeah.
For LLMs, not so much since you can't really own reddit comments
I find llms useful for some things,
Sometimes the duckduckgo ai summary of results can include a source I was looking for that was buried in the results (I don't trust the ai much since it literally cited Ireland's Nazi party uncritically once, but it does link to sources). Formatting text is also really useful, or turning something from csv to a markdown table and vice versa.
Its also able to extract text from images a lot better than "dumb" ocrs (which I still use for basic images), and can format it in a certain way (e.g., take this screenshot from an ebook and format it as a quizlet).
I have try seeing what they're like for programming every once in a while, and my verdict is still shit. They can do very basic stuff thats basically regurgitating functions that were written before, but not original stuff (they're very poor at making regexes). They're similarly bad at debugging, though they can sometimes point you in the right direction.
The response from ai-bros for the programming thing is usually something along the lines of how you should try Claude opus, but I am never paying a cent on any ai thing. At that point it's easier to just use my brain.
I also can find phrasing stuff hard at times, so being able to send a word salad to a chatbot and get a proper sentence is useful. Or suggesting words.
I think we had very different experiences, i tried Ollama with Claude Code (just to use their free models, i don't want to pay a cent) and it helped me a lot with debugging and writing the boring stuff (or sometimes even refactor old code that i was too afraid to touch by how much it was done poorly), and it also helps with reading the logs of something ex: i had a problem with a minecraft mod that crashed the whole game, i couldn't find a shit in the logs so i just asked to the clanker to search for me and while i took a piss he found the problem, it would've taken me a lot otherwise
Yeah, parsing large text to find relevant stuff is very useful for stuff a simple CTRL-F doesn't work for. I found it useful for parsing .har files to find how a specific value is made for a request.
It's not ready for commercial use by the general public.
We see this ALL the time in America - a new disruptive technology emerges. We jump all over the benefits and the profits without regard to consequences or expense. We suffer.
New cheap pesticide? Hell yeah, spray that DDT everywhere, it's super effective! (Insert other endless examples here, from microplastics to asbestos.)
AI (and information technology in general) has shown itself to be a danger to human beings. Its effects are not felt so much in the short term (5 or 10 years) but generationally. We've seen that information technology has already impacted quality of life. It's used as spyware, as a tool to collect and correlate massive amounts of data. It's used to shape our media experience, our purchasing, our social circles. There are great things, like online banking. But they seem more and more to be outweighed by a loss of humanity. So much misinformation that I question my own reality some days.
What we call "AI" is the evolution of these obtrusive, coercive practices. It exists purely to replace human thinking skills. I've spent a bit of time in r/teachers over the last 15 years, and the stories keep getting worse. The rise of AI means that detecting plagiarism/cheating is exponentially more difficult. But, more importantly, the kids don't have any stress when it comes to cheating. They don't have to find a friend or know the bare minimum. They can just...cheat. And they never learn to problem solve or overcome adversity.
None of this matters, though. Ready or not, here we are. A new kind of slavery for a new world order.
You raise many good points, but social media also has benefits and is not all just negative. Same with AI and all tech. We are better off overall with tech despite the downsides which we should be doing a better job of mitigating.
This is the part where I lose faith. We have failed to mitigate the downsides. In fact, we have encouraged the monetization of the downsides.
I think we should be building localized, smaller, more finely-tuned LLMs.
I used AI to help with debugging and coding, as well as exploring a theory I came up with a long time ago - and with my framework and notes and research papers and everything else I’ve collected to support my theory, I was able to put it into application with my own AI cybersecurity I’ve developed.
We’ve created 26,000 new cyber threat datasets because I had access to an LLM that could help me take the frameworks, notes, and research I’d gathered in my attempts to build this out and within a couple months I had something that blew my prototype out of the water.
My startup in cybersecurity- we use less than 1GB of ram, at peak use maybe 30% of a single cpu core, and it was build with ethics and safeguards in mind. Not LLM but real Machine + reinforcement learning.
To me ethics also meant resource awareness. If I’m poisoning the planet and the people then it’s not a good product.
Building smaller, more specialized local models is not only better from a cybersecurity perspective, but smaller local LLMs mean new startups to build them, a race to innovate and improve resource usage, more data privacy, smaller attack surface, no obscenely expensive API calls and overage fees…
What we should have is a Symbiotic approach to AI - a partnership sort of understanding.
LLMs helped me with debugging and putting this research and theory together. And in a fraction of the time it took me to build the framework.
I pushed autonomous operation because I felt that it was about giving people their time back. Providing freedom. If my cybersecurity can take care of 94.1% of all threats before they reach an analyst - that analyst doesn’t have to wake up at 2AM to sift through 10000 false positives. We do it.
Now that analyst can do what they got a degree to do - actually defend a network. Build and explore threat research and databases. Find their purpose again.
We require that a human is always in the loop and help protect cybersecurity jobs by ensuring that all human input is always the final decision. Let our AI do the heavy lifting so you can take care of this shit that matters and what you really want to do.
Sorry I think my adhd took control of this conversation.
Nope.
I've always said I think it's fine in filler content, it can allow small teams to quickly populate their world with background stuff that you never notice. Except when it's not there.
But with great power comes great responsibility. And I don't necssesarily think most can handle that.
I'll use it at work to do stupid tasks from HR that are not worth my time. I won't verify the outputs because it isn't important.
For important things, no I don't really use it. Got a few locally hosted but don't really use them
I work in the UK public sector and often have to respond to complaints from people who have written a 4 page rant without any punctuation.
Copilot is amazing for taking that 4 page long rant and reducing it down to something I can actually respond to.
I don't use copilot for drafting the reply, I do that myself. But I'll use copilot as a proof reading tool.
As far as I'm concerned I'm responsible for creating content and the AI helps tweak it
Don't use AI as a proofreading tool. Proofreading should be done by humans.
I'd say one of the things llms can do well is language. (Or are you arguing that humans deserve to have the proofreading job instead, which I can agree with)
I mean for helping amend the tone etc.
My work is sensitive, theres only one other person in my organisation allowed to review what I do and she is often busy.
never, almost everyone who uses it become kinda lazy themselves, and they always keep referring to "chatgpt as an answer to your question"
I think it's useful as a starting point for a lot of things. I can ask AI a question about a topic I know nothing about, which will typically give me some context on the topic and the terminology to do further research.
No.
At work I do not think their use is ever justifiable because the rapidly increase the amount of satisficing behavior from my colleagues. I have had many experiences where obviously bad work was submitted that was clearly llm generated and it was clear that the person submitting it just generated the output and handed it over. People turn their brains off.
The other thing I have noticed about their use is, once you start caring about the quality of your work, their value plummets. If I were to use one for my work I would need to check its output by experimenting with code, doing research, thoroughly considering both sides of an argument, etc. But if I were not going to use one I would do my own work by experimenting with code, doing research, thoroughly considering both sides of an argument, etc. So what is the advantage to using one? Either way I am still putting forth the effort to ensure my work-product is high quality. Going clackity-clack on the keyboard is not the hard part of my job, all the other stuff is.
I read that they're not terrible when used to power NPC's in games.
https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/company-that-makes-generative-ai-powered-npcs-reports-that-95-percent-of-players-enjoy-their-generative-ai-powered-npcs/
Not my personal take, mind you, but thought it relevant.
I mean there's effectively very capable text and conversation. Generators so powering NPCs is most definitely a strong suit for them.
Especially if you self-host some smaller models, you can effectively just do this on your own hardware for pretty cheap.
Having customizable dialogue per player that shifts the tone based off of players, actions, level gear or interactions with that NPC or other NPCs that that MPC is associated with is really cool.
Yeah I thought as much, but I'm no expert in the subject so I left the details for smarter people.
Ever? Sure.
I think its great for inspiration but your final product should never be raw AI/LLM output
Probably programming, i used Claude Code recently and it's wonderful because i can use it for debugging stuff that i can't undersfand or i can make him do boring ass stuff that i could do myself but just eat my time uselessly (So i can go make a mug of tea or a cup of coffe! Not work XD)
But i want to underline that it will NEVER replace a programmer, to stupid to do it rn, but it can really help our work and that we need to push for self-hostable AIs, right now there are many models but they either require too much resources or are stupid...i hope that we improve their efficency more...
I agree that they are unethical rn because it's all stolen stuff, i hope to be able to make my own AI in future that is trained in a more ethical way(just as hobby open source project tho)
I have used AI to make a few games for my kids, and a couple of apps that I wanted for my own wants/needs. In both cases it was very frustrating and I cant beleave people that say the current state is 'great'. It was barely fictional and needed constant over-site - if I didn't know at least basic C++/PHP/javascript and html/css I don't know if it would be that usefull.
It helped me to rapidly prototype, but needed lots of work to keep it on track. I can see how agents go rogue and delete whole dir trees etc.
As for the environmental costs, even with out LLMs I think we are fucked with what we have done up to now and what the US seems hell bent on bringing on us (the rest or the world)
I used Copilot to build me a performance review based on actual data (which I reviewed and edited) and my boss said it was the best one he received from 30 people on the team.
I feel like self hosting LLMs and GenAi is slightly better for the environment, definitely less environmental impact than gaming.
It just these massive datacenters and models. If people can just be a little more patient and specialized with their AI usage it saves so much electricity
No one wants this beside for people who lack creativity.
What AI should be doing is learning how to take out my garbage, cut my grass, and do the dishes for me. Not whatever this dystopian bullshit is.
I am a student in CS, and today my uni has completely changed its policy on AI. They used to completely ban it. Now, professors use LLMs to make their course materials, generate illustrations etc. They encourage using LLMs to understand courses, to work on our projects… I have one practical session where they straight up give us the prompts to use if stuck.
Now, I might get hate and I understand it, but they are truly useful. A course that would’ve taken a whole weekend to understand is all wrapped up in a few hours. You can ask very specific and "niche" questions it’ll understand and explain in the words that are most adapted to you.
Yes, I use LLMs. I do not condone generating "art" from it like images, videos or music.
But it’s such a great tool and a teaching mentor. If you don’t use it to do your homework for you but to have a better understanding of topics you’re not familiar with it, I find it valid.
Never use ai for something you don't understand! Especially in a niche subject. AI is very good at connecting words that are statistically likely to go together. They're also biased to produce answers that sound confident.
The end result is an answer that appears correct, and if you don't know well enough to identify an "apparently correct but factually wrong" answer then you'll just believe it.
I teach computer science at a uni. I would much much perfer student to ask me the question instead of LLM. I will give them a much better answer because the LLM probably learned from my published stuff, which is already super surface level, and then they will distill again.
I understand this is not feasible for larger classes, especially introduction classes. But please, if you ever move on to upper level classes and professor welcomes questions, talk to the professor, not the LLM.
They are literally theft.
If you made all the training data yourself, or ethically acquired the training data, then go nuts do whatever you want with it. See Corridor Digital's ai chroma key thingy.
If the training data isn't ethically sourced, then it gets iffy.
I use ai primarily for my own entertainment. None of it are things I'd want to share with the world. Is "dicking around" justifiable? Eh. I eat meat and shop at amazon, both of which are things that some people would find "not justifiable", so someone is going to be upset with me no matter what.
In the case of artistically, I don't take offense to ai tools being part of a process, what's important to me is that the ai isn't the entire process. You wouldn't go to a cinema, record the movie with your phone camera, then post it online saying "look at what I made". That's nonsense. But if you took clips of that same movie, rearranged and dubbed over them thus creating a new unique work, you could post that online and say "look what I made". Whatever the ai output, no matter how detailed your prompt, should be treated as being made by someone else. You don't get to say "look what I made" unless you actually do something with it.
Another use case is summarizing conversations and compiling notes. This is another one that I do often. I could go on for hours about a subject (usually while drunk) and at the end I tell it "compile a detailed report on everything discussed, be verbose and leave out no details" or something similar, and that output goes into my notes documents. It's fine to copy pasta that, because it's not going to be anything that anyone ever actually sees.
You can waste its time on useless crap, increasing the cost, which, while an environmental disaster, hastens the inevitable crash.
You do realize that counts as "engagement" which AI companies then use to turn around and get more investor money?
Either use it for actual work or don't use it at all.
Using ai is worse for you than smoking
Yes of course. There is no moral issue.
IP is a scam, and the environmental impact is overblown.
I trust everyone foaming at the mouth about ai is vegan because eating animals is way more destructive.
I wouldn't say the environmental issue is overblown, but it does have a solution.
And human life is way more destructive for the environment than AI, so I trust everyone complaining about AI killed themselves.
See the flaw in this kind of reasoning?
I see the flaw in your reasoning, yes.
Going vegan isn’t equivalent to killing yourself. Just eat beans mate it’s easy.
Being vegan or not has nothing to do with identifying bad faith arguments. I am a vegetarian just btw as it seems that gives me more credibility in arguing with you.
Youre saying people are not allowed to care for one thing if they dont care for another vaguely related topic. Almost anything humans do is harmful for the environment and everyone needs to decide for themselves how important certain aspects are to them. Some people want to have kids which is absolutely terrible environment-wise. Would you say theyre not allowed to complain about oil lobbyism?
Vegetarians are still carnists and it doesn’t give you any additional credibility, no. Less in my eyes on the ethical front.
It’s not a vaguely related topic. It’s the same one, avoidable purchases which support environmental destruction. If it’s the environmental destruction that concerns you I’d hope you’d cut out the #1 avoidable cause before getting on a pedestal. Eating animals provides no benefits whereas using AI does, as evident from that Linux game thingie developer who got dogpilled on here the other day for saying he used ai to help him get over burnout.
I dont know why you are constantly trying to make this discussion about me and my personal preferences.
Have a good day.
You brought it up lol
Anywhere. People will laugh at you for this conversation in 10 years. It's not going away. Ever.
no, never.
AI is fascism. it all supports fascist companies that wish for nothing more than to enslave you.
why anyone would want to support the thing that wants you enslaved or dead is beyond me.
AI isn't fascism, it's a tool. Fascists use art in their propaganda, does that make art fascist? No. Fascism doesn't create, it just corrupts. The problem we have, that we have always had, is with people, not the tools they use. The tools may be terrifying in their hands, but we can't just wish them gone any more than we can wish nuclear weapons away. We have to figure out how to live with them.
AI is fascism. it's a tool being employed to circumvent democracy and attack our personal freedoms.
no AI company is in existence that isn't desperately attempting to enslave us all.
I will never "live with it". much the same way I'll never "live with" rapists or child molesters.
I still think you're mistaking the murder weapon for the murderer. AI is just a program, it can be used for whatever purpose the mind can devise. If someone uses an airplane to traffic children, I don't think a reasonable response is to say that airplanes are child traffickers.
Also I don't mean "live with" to imply a surrender to how other people (including fascists) use AI. We should do everything in our power to build the world we want to live in, and that means dismantling the power structures of those who abuse them. I mean accepting that AI tools exist and then planning from there. Wishing that they had never been invented is a perfectly fine thing to do, they are something of a headache at the moment, but they're here and can't be un-invented. We can either find a comfortable existence in this reality and strive for that (perhaps by limiting their use), or resign ourselves to the doom we find ourselves in.
If it's such a horrible and powerful tool, how are you going to resist it? Every criticism you make against it is a reason for people with ill intent to use it.
Do you think it'll just go away if you say it's "fascism" often enough? You can carve out a little corner of ideological purity in some corner of the internet but you're not going to get rid of AI.
You're basically insisting on absolute pacifism in the face of an overwhelming power. Noble maybe, but you're doomed to lose.