Technology

I don't. Played with it a bit but as a capable writer and coder I don't find it fills a need and just shifts the effort from composition (which I enjoy) to editing and review (which I don't).

Not much. I totally agree with Linus Torvalds in that AIs are just overhyped autocorrects on steroids, and I despise that the artwork generators are all based on theft.

Pretty much all I use them for is to make my life easier at work, like turning a quick draft into a formal email.

I don't and the energy consumption of public AI services is a stopper for "testing and playing around". I think I'll just wait until it takes over the world as advertised.

Nope, nothing. There doesn't honestly seem to be anything I'd use it for, even then I wouldn't wanna support it as long as it uses Data its gotten by basically stealing. Maybe once that has gotten better I'll look more into it, but at the current moment I just don't have the heart to support it

• Summarising articles / extracting information / transforming it according to my needs. Everyone knows LLM-bssed summaries are great, but not many folks utilise them to their full extent. For instance, yesterday, Sony published a blog piece on how a bunch of games were discounted on the PlayStation store. This was like a really long list that I couldn't be bothered reading, so I asked ChatGPT to display just the genres that I'm interested in, and sort them according to popularity. Another example is parsing changelogs for software releases, sometimes some of them are really long (and not sorted properly - maybe just a dump of commit messages), so I'd ask it to summarise the changes, maybe only show me new feature additions, or any breaking changes etc.

• Translations. I find ChatGPT excellent at translating Asian languages - expecially all the esoteric terms used in badly-translated Chinese webcomics. I feed in the pinyin word and provide context, and ChatGPT tells me what it means in that context, and also provides alternate translations. This is a 100 times better than just using Google Translate or whatever dumb dictionary-based translator, because context is everything in Asian languages.

I find that LLM powered autocomplete when programming makes me more productive.

Occasionally I'll use a chatbot to help me reword an email or other text, though this is rare.

I'm not a programmer but I work with IT and I regularly need complex shell scripts. ChatGPT has enabled me to skip the largest portion of slamming my head against the wall by writing the script for me and then I can tune it if it gets something wrong. Saves me hours and hours of my life.

and porn

I use it to generate code documentation because I'm incapable of documenting things without sounding like a condescending ass. Paste in a function, tell it to produce docstrings and doctests, then edit the hell out of it to sound more human and use actual data in the tests.

Its also great for readmes. I have a template that I follow for that and only work on one section at a time.

porn

I find them neat, but there's just too many issues I can't overlook.

The environmental impact of these technologies is immense, and growing exponentially.

A vast amount of the training data used for the big llms and image generators is not in the public domain, which is at best ethically grey but at worst just blatantly exploiting artists and other professionals.

If there existed some alternatives to the big names that avoided both of these issues, I'd love to use them for code autocomplete and image generation for ttrpgs, but as it stands the moral cost is too high.

I use Stable Diffusion to make character portraits and scenes for my D&D game that I run in Foundry. Better than trying to scrounge Google images!

Mostly for finding information that for whatever reason can be difficult to find using search engines. For example, I've used ChatGPT to ask spoiler-free questions about plot points in books I'm reading, which has worked rather well. It hasn't spoiled me yet, but rather tells me that giving more information would be a spoiler.

Last time I tried to look something up on Google, carefully, I got a massive spoiler for the end of the entire book series.

I also use it for code-related questions at times, but very rarely, and mostly when using a language I'm not used to. Such as when I wrote an expect script for the first (and perhaps only) time recently.

I’ve used it to tweak a speech I was writing to make it more appropriate to my intended audience….

I love that the top comments are all "I don't", as if that's helpful in any way.

I use it all the time to write Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerApps formulas. I use it to draft and re-write e-mails. I use it to come up with ideas and brainstorm.

I find a ton of uses for quick Python scripts hammered out with Bing Chat to get random stuff done.

It's also super useful when brainstorming and fleshing out stuff for the tabletop roleplaying games I run. Just bounce ideas off it, have it write monologues, etc.

There is no AI. But I regularly use data, machine learning, statistics, and other math for just about everything.

https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/there-is-no-ai

I’ve found it useful for getting approaches to programming projects. Rarely does it completely solve my problems, but it keeps me headed in the right direction.

I’m also partway through making my first ARG and it’s super useful for generating ideas, especially when I feed it my established lore because it can keep ideas within that universe.

I’ve found overall, it’s best to use it to fill in the gaps on ideas I have in general. I theoretically could make all of the content myself from scratch, but I’m honestly terrible at all the little details in many cases. It allows me to not dwell on the little stuff.

I pretty much only use it for brainstorming ideas.

The only practical thing I have found I can do with AI is brainstorm ideas (or rather expand upon little ideas I have but don't know where to go after) or figure out what's wrong with a snippet of code when I can't figure it out on my own.

• Improved autocomplete when programming
• Recommendations for third party packages or protocols for programming or letting it list details for them, or comparing two competing implementations
• Hints for my TTRPG stories (not so great for that, because it always uses very similar ideas)
• Helping recalling a word I forgot by simply describing what I mean, same with phrases or proverbs

Enhanced googling

I use it quite a bit. I don’t trust big companies who commercialize AI so I run my AIs locally on my old retired gaming desktop that I’ve turned into a homelab/media server.

I use Kobold.AI to self host an LLM like ChatGPT (Dolphin-Mistral7b if you are curious). I mainly use it for low effort knowledge searches for stuff that is easier typed out long and descriptive (since google struggles with this). Since it’s AI I have to be careful about what I search since I’ve seen it make stuff up but for the majority of what I use it for (Programming syntax, Linux troubleshooting, general questions) it’s pretty good.

I also have Stable Diffusion running as well using the ICBINP model (which is pretty decent for photorealistic images). I use this AI to generate social media display pictures and porn :) it’s fun because it’s a surprise at what you’re going to get but sometimes it generates absolute horrors. Anatomical horrors. Those are genuinely horrific. Other times it’s really good.

@jeena I only use DeepL to translate and that's it. I also started taking notes in .md files, so that could make for a good use case in the future if there was an AI that I could use without connecting to the internet (e.g. to only let me tell stuff based on the files I got). Otherwise I am pretty reticent on AI. Perhaps I watched too many fiction movies, but I am afraid it will become too sentient and somehow escape the human oversight, thus creating havoc in our lives.

I've used it to make specific images for work proposals that stock sources may not have. Sometimes for fun, I vary it so it's in the style of a cartoon or a Japanese woodcut.

Out of say a year, I have used it once to help put a work quote into better formatting, the rest of the time I use it solely as a way to suggest films I would enjoy based on a previously warched list, it is actually good at that

A lot of translation and summarisation. ChatGPT is extremely good in absorbing a whole mix of comments in different languages and summarising them in English (or whatever other language).

For programming I don't use it so much anymore because it hallucinates too much, calling APIs that don't even exist. And when I lower the temperature the output is too sparse.

I'm also trying to build an assistant that can also communicate proactively (I intend to auto-prompt it when things happen and then evaluate if it should cause a message to me). But I need to get a local LLM going for that because running that through the ChatGPT API will be too costly.

Also, a replacement for some of my web searches. Sometimes I just want to know something and it's refreshing that it can give me an answer (even though it does need to be validated, it's much easier to do that when you know what you're looking for!)

I've only used DuckDuckGo's implementations of GPT and Claude. I haven't really found a use case yet. I don't trust it enough to for queries related to things I don't understand (gaps in my knowledge) and would rather solve these problems or learn these skills through exisiting sources of information that I know have had at least some level of human refinement/vetting. Personally I enjoy the challenge of problem solving in life, particularly when the solution involves learning a new skill that I can utilise again in the future. I find it interesting that AI is advertised as being able to maximise our capabilities as humans, because it appears to be used for the complete opposite in most cases. People want to use their brains less and just be spoonfed the answers.

Only use deep learning ai with deepl translations and for some text annotation project I did for uni.

So far, there have been two interesting uses I've seen for chat gpt.

One is I've used it to help me write regular expressions in the very rare time I need to for my job.

The other is kind of cool but also kind of troubling in a way. But I've come across a couple of therapy style chat bots that are essentially just reading off a list of "here's what to do for XYZ"

I've tested them a bit, and I've found I'm 1) concerned who gets access to the information shared. 2) If/when these kinds of bots will be used to manipulate people in a negative way. 3)The possibility of a bot replying in a bad way that could make an issue worse for someone

Overall, I like the idea of them. I find it's hard to process information if it's coming directly from myself, or accept compassion from myself. So funny enough, these chat bots actually work really well in that respect.

In some cases, I've had better discussions than I have had with actual therapists, which is funny but also sad.

So while there's some troubling possibilities, I think there's a lot of positives that I've seen from my time with it.

I use it to see the answers to problems on my physics homework when I can't figure it or myself. It works far better than forums, which are mostly all paywalled these days.