There are countless constructive and legitimate uses for AI/LLMs. This just another form of automation, and it works well for many tasks already. Other people in the thread have already given a ton of examples, so I don’t really have to reiterate them here. Meanwhile, practically all the criticisms of this tech actually boil down to problems with how it’s applied under capitalism.
AI transcription might not be 100%, but it’s better than captioning long form shows myself or sending it to Rev.
I use a local instance of deepseek in the rare instance I need to have something written with a specific tone or style. I also tend to create a terrible work relationship for myself because I was a huge people pleaser and this has helped make my emails a bit more confident when necessary, especially when I have to advocate for myself. I am getting better at doing this on my own though.
I’d use the term Machine Learning to avoid the baggage of what AI implies/promises. But ML has tons of real world applications that other tech can’t solve. I view it as the best tool for fuzzy or approximate data. It’s used in statistical modeling, which can be applied to the automated generation of potential new drugs or proteins. ML can be used in image processing, with image recognition being a huge use case, as well as real-time upscaling like DLSS. And it can be great for Speech-to-Text, natural language processing is a difficult problem to solve but ML approaches do it fairly consistently. These are applications that can generally tolerate the sizable margin of error that a statistical model inherently possesses, either by not being mission critical or by being designed to get reviewed by human experts; I don’t think ML should ever be applied to areas which need guaranteed precision or accuracy. Also note that of all of these examples, only one uses an LLM, and none vie for the title of “AGI” or claim consciousness or intelligence lol. So that’s why I avoid the term AI. ML can imply some of the same stuff but it hasn’t been buzzwordified the same way
Yeh, AI is used in/for language revitalisation and preservation projects, machine translation, live captioning, speech synthesis, medicine, wildlife preservation, disaster detection, weather forecasting and more
Depends what you mean by AI and by legitimate.
So far it seems to be super useful for the following topics:
- customer support (super annoying if you cannot directly forward to a human)
- programming (especially web development; only as a tool)
- finding rhymes
- writing checkers (only as a tool)
- (log) anomaly detection
- computer vision
If you consider moral in “legitimate”, you might dislike programming, customer support and writing checkers as these replace jobs. However, I strongly believe in AI tax and redistributing that money towards everyone especially affected jobs (artists, …). I feel like artificially limiting the applicability will just be a loss to the global market unless something similar is achieved by figuring out the copyright issues.
AI has a use case, but after trying to use LLMs for generative content like creative writing or storytelling, I think it more of a word salad. Unless you are one of those pros thay can generate content that looks human, no idea how they do it.
https://aibooru.online/posts/96423
was there at any time , say in the last 50 or so years, at any point, new tech that we, the tech enthusiasts, folks who go out of their way to buy and use and find new uses for tech, tech that we somehow missed to see its usefulness? anything that needed this much debating and convincing and hand-wrangling and moral bargaining? and having those fucking cretins on the other side of the argument?
did someone need to convince you the web is awesome? mobile phone? electric car? conversely, you instantly knew VR is bullshit. and crypto. and all its derivatives.
this shit ain’t what they say it is, there ain’t no I in this ai. you perpetuating this butlerian bullshit means you swallowed their spiel (look up critihyping), that this financial scam dressed up as progress is an inevitability.
this just needs a normal revolution, of the kind that was enacted a coupla times in history, stripping the right folks of a buncha stuff that I ain’t gonna specify here, for entirely legal reasons.
I was never excited by VR because I’m in the 10-20% of the population that uses some of the visual cues for depth that VR doesn’t mimic and so gets motion sick.
I was excited by AR. The technology is almost good enough to be useful. It’s currently at the stage smartphones were when I owned a Nokia N80: not actually useful, but you can see the potential. But, for it to actually be useful, it needs to be designed with private as the number one requirement and that’s not something I’d trust big tech to do, so I don’t see the interesting use cases appearing any time soon.
Machines that confidently generate wrong answers? I’ve dealt with enough humans like that to not want to see it automated.
I mean, back in high school I knew someone who used machine learning to simulate basically the perfect game of monopoly, but otherwise, probably not any that I can think of.
I did hear of a game that eventually tried to replace the VA for the announcer with AI that used machine learning to basically make the enemies able to move around the environment better, but that’s also something not super useful AFAIK.
Otherwise, I have no clue since the closest I’ve seen to good use of it, if it is AI, would be the games that use proximity chat that create clones of you that will say things you have already said. Or you speak spell words/phrases and magic happens. Again, seems like more of a hobbyist thing since that kind of speech command thing is already a real thing and the game(s) implementation(s) isn’t/aren’t revolutionizing anything or making speech commands any better, AFAIK.
Seems like the perfect technology to create a browser extension that re-writes article headlines to be non-clickbait and actually reflect the content of an article. Bonus points if it could redo youtube titles and thumbnails.
Check out dearrow: https://dearrow.ajay.app/
Is this really useful when LMMs will fabricate court cases out of thin air?
There are plenty, as others have said, it has been able to help a lot in science. It has been used for finding new drugs, search for composite materials.
Sadly i don’t think the pros will outweigh the cons, the society as is right now won’t let it happen. I truly think this tool, even without any fancy AGI, if used in a responsible manner could help us solve some of the most pressing problems the world has.
But it won’t happen, look at the irresponsible manner the capitalist society has rolled out this tech, which is still in its infancy. It has wasted tons and tons of energy on models that are not yet fully mature. Brute force training of shit models just to get the best monthly benchmark over competitors. It’s so sad to see all the promised goals in terms of saving energy and water that went to garbage the moment the AI hype exploded.
And what we got for that? A bunch of models causing problems because they are not ready. Executives cutting workforce, in part to justify the use the tooling, only to get shittier services. And worse of all, shortage of water and energy to pump more compute.
Even if we get to a future where AI is cheap, powerful and capable, it will only be used widen the gap between the wealthy and the common people.
Stephen Hawking said it way more eloquently already in 2014
The potential benefits of creating intelligence are huge. […]. Perhaps with the tools of this new technological revolution, we will be able to undo some of the damage done to the natural world by the last one — industrialisation. And surely we will aim to finally eradicate disease and poverty. […] In short, success in creating AI, could be the biggest event in the history of our civilisation.
But it could also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks. Alongside the benefits, AI will also bring dangers, like powerful autonomous weapons, or new ways for the few to oppress the many. It will bring great disruption to our economy.
Sorry for the doomer rant, its a conflicted topic for me, feel free to skip.
Of course there are many legitimate and/or constructive uses for AI. Like any new technology, it depends on what you do with it. You can use it do help or harm, that is up to us.
For example, in many countries getting a radiologist to look at medical scans takes a lot of time and is a huge bottleneck. AI can help accelerate this.
Yes. Right now I think the real questions are:
- Are þey worþ þe cost? If we count þe real cost - not þe subsidized, but þe hidden, þe environmental, þe social, and þe intellectual costs - do þey add equivalent value?
- Are þey eþically justifiable given þat þey are plagiarism machines?
Tons. I think if people read my opinions on AI they likely see me as a luddite.
My concerns are not about whether it’s useful. It’s that if the 1% use it to replace most actual workers, the lack of input will make future models actually worse than current ones, and at the very least would stifle innovation.
I’m very concerned about models built on the IP (voluntarily given or not) of people, being used to replace those same people.
I’m very concerned with where we go as a society if we do go down the route of losing so many jobs.
I’m concerned about the race to get the best model, using so much energy and natural resources.
But do I think AI is and can be a very powerful tool, to enhance productivity? Without a doubt it can.
Basically, the actual problem is with the capitalist system of relations and how automation is inevitably applied by the capitalists to harm workers.
It’s very useful for software development for many applications. I use it every day as a software developer.
Same, AI haters really don’t realize just how far this tech has come in just the past year. I’ve had to work on frontend Js projects at work, and I’ve been lucky enough to avoid Js for most of my career. I have lots of experience programming, and I know how to structure applications, but I’m not familiar with Js stack, libraries, and syntax quirks. LLMs help me paper over all that and use it like any other language I’m already well versed in. Without LLMs, I would’ve had to spent literally months ramping up on Js ecosystem to do the work I’m doing now.
Machine Learning for pattern recognition in very large datasets seems like good usage.
LLMs are just auto-complete with sycophantic tendencies.
If and when AGI comes, it’ll evolve from robotics, and won’t be the egregious energy suck that the current brute force approach.
