Asklemmy

It's got lots of uses:

• driving up fossil fuel revenues
• providing a solid excuse for laying off a bunch of employees
• disciplining labor
• offloading blame for unpopular decisions
• increasing surveillance and nonconsensual data collection

I've used it to help me set up a home server. I can paste text from log files or ask about something not working and it tells me what the problem is. It gets things wrong a lot, but this is the perfect low risk use for AI....for sending me in the right direction when I have no idea why things aren't working. When it's completely wrong, it doesn't really matter.

The real test for AI is: "does it matter when it is completely wrong". If the answer is yes, then that's not a suitable use for AI.

Solo roleplay. You can make a character and interact. Generate fake conversations etc.

With generative images you can create custom backgrounds, portraits and landscapes instead of having to lookup for them or doing it yourself.

You can also do some interactive story telling that it's kind of fun.

Generating quick test questions over a certain topic. It's another use case I've seen it being quite good at.

I self host Deepseek R1 and it's been pretty helpful with simple Linux troubleshooting, generating bash commands, and even programming troubleshooting. The thinking feature is pretty cool and I do find myself learning stuff from it.

What took it from gimmick to actual nice to have for me is when my jerry rigged home network broke and wouldn't connect to the internet. Having what is entially an interactive StackOverflow/ServerFault running on a local machine was really helpful.

Running the model locally makes it easier to not overly rely on AI because of the limited token rate.

You know those business books that combine flimsy pop psychology and self help literature with personal development and business goals? Yeah, those books with 300 pages and only one good idea per 100 pages if you’re lucky. Rest of it is just fabricated stories, ideas copied from other books and regurgitation of ideas from the previous chapters to fluff up the page count. Yes, that category!

Well guess what? GPT can generate precisely that level of quality without any effort. In fact, it seems to gravitate towards that style unless you specifically work hard to steer it to aim higher. It has never been easier to become a business book author! Zero editing required. Just prompt and publish.

It feels like this is the one area where GPT truly excels.

Creating low-effort images for ideas that don't warrant effort, like silly jokes.

I see it as a toy. No different from the Slinky or Silly Putty I had as a kid. Just something to play with.

Regarding the job application, most companies and sites are using shitty AI to rummage through the piles of resumes they receive.

The whole job application process is frankly one of the worst real world use of most technologies, not only AI

Inspiration for writing emails, letters, text messages. I always check what the thing wrote though.

I'd love to have an AI assistant that does shit like call service providers and wait in queue and take care of business for me

You can't steal data, only illegally copy it. The original data holder still has the data, just you do too.

I don't use it for writing code because that's what I love but I use it for documentation and other stuff I hate.....😂

I find it good for music and film suggestions. You feed it a set of ( I want a suggestion like these ) and it provides a good result.

Also good at building mermaid code for diagrams, just tell it write me mermaid code for this, and drop in a descriptive paragraph, then copy paste the code into mermaid.live

That use case became very useful so there is a paid mermaid page to automate that manual process.

There's only a few use cases where I've found I prefer it to doing things the hard way.

• As a thesaurus, since it's great for going "what's that one word that sort of means all encompassing, commonly used in reference to research/studies?" and it'll end up giving me "holistic."
• As part of other software, such as how Linkwarden automatically tags bookmarks by category when I add them
• Double checking the answers I've come up with in regard to hyper-specific questions (usually about how a given piece of software can/can't be used, or how it'll interact with something else) just to make sure I'm not blatantly missing anything.

However, I try to avoid using it for anything that otherwise requires productive mental effort, because I find that I end up being a lot more informed and capable if I spend 5 minutes going through sites, learning about a topic, identifying wrong answers, and being able to put together better new queries in the first place, than I do if I ask a chatbot, even if it pulls from those same sources.

When you have a chatbot summarize or combine/condense information, you'll always lose nuance and additional context, and very frequently that context will actually be helpful to your overall understanding. There's also many cases where, for example, someone on a forum explains an issue a bit, and their profile has more related information on it that an LLM simply wouldn't go for, only summarizing from their one response on that page. This can lead me down a rabbit hole that then leads me to finding other good sources. Maybe someone mentions that a particular site is helpful for what I'm looking for, and that then becomes something I use more frequently when I do searches for things, whereas an LLM would have just ignored that comment.

I used to spend days rotoscoping people in videos. Generative infill for background painting and automatic rotoscoping have saved probably a year of my life at this point. Image generation relies on CLIP, which needs a language model for conditioning.

It's good for rapid output of plausibly human text that can then be sorted or assessed for adequate validity or utility. That's all.

I use it at work for stuff where it would be inefficient for me to pick up entirely new side skills to only be used rarely and sporadically.

For example, I made a spreadsheet tool to compose ordering spreadsheets in Excel for a system at work that needs them. Most of it uses basic macros that you can record with the basic macro recorder in Excel, with no special skill required, but every now and then I need to introduce functionality into it that's far more complex.

Instead of learning obscure VBA coding for something I do once every two months, I can just tell ChatGPT that I have spreadsheet A called this and spreadsheet B called that, assume that they are both open, and write me a macro that does A and then B and then C and then D between them.

It does it in five seconds, I plug the code in, test it, and then go about my day. That's its positive use case for me.

I'm very much against AI slop and hate how it's the most prominent use in day to day life.

With that said, I work for a small government contracting company. We are careful about what we bid on, and of course it's not a sure bet that we'll get it. There is a lot of boilerplate stuff in these proposals. When I was on the bench, my boss asked me to help find some AI tools to help with proposal writing.

Honestly? I can see it being used in cases like this. I wish there weren't so much fluff needed in these things, but that's the hand we're dealt. It's not necessarily worth hiring another proposal writer for what we do, and I certainly wouldn't use its output as-is without knowing what you're proposing, but to get some decent starting verbiage, section by section, to be adjusted after? Yeah, I can see that being useful.

Best (or at least most addictive) use of AI I've seen so far is https://anycrap.shop/

I personally use generative AI for thumbnail art (Stable Diffusion models locally downloaded, with LoRA for the 1.5 models I use), and so does my producer. We disclose when we use the models, and our prompting is actually really good (just inpainting is something we don't do).

I needed the following CSS copied 51 times with a 0.05 s increment, because CSS can't for-loop and didn't want JavaScript:

#butterfly span:nth-child(1) {
  animation-delay: 0s;
}

I know I could've just for-looped it somewhere else and copy-paste the output, but I was curious if DeepSeek could do it.

I used it to violate industrial copyrights. For whatever reason, all Australian standards for technical drawings are behind paywalls

For engineering... Get me a script that calculates the length of a window based on a similar size. Or calculate the tip velocity of a turbine blade given the speed of the gas going into it and the diameter of the turbine. Basically things we would have to take a month to design so as to answer other questions. Cuz nobody pays you to make quick calculation tools.

We have a got at work that’s trained on all our internal docs and handbooks. It’s useful because you can ask it operational stuff like, “how do I request time off?” or “when are performance reviews?”

It’s good for stuff where you might not know who to ask or where to find the answer on internal stuff

Giving me a paragraph where Tom Cruise grows increasingly frustrated during his juggalo-themed commercial for shrimp fried rice.

I ask for information sometimes that I cannot find in few minutes of googling (I use a lot of this information in writing fiction). I generate images once in a while for role playing and storywriting. (Not sure if it is AI but) I turn some text over to speech, to listen at my stories.

I have some Hone Assistant automations, that creates some todos in Habitica for me. These todos are ai generated, so they sound like quests in a rpg 😎 this really motivates me. Also it's funny

• I use it for research and then verify its findings.
• It’s excellent at summarizing quickly.
• It’s great at idea creation for specific needs and outlining it.
• While it’s good at writing I enjoy that and do it myself to keep my specific tone.

I've tried ChatGPT a few times to see if it's useful for me, and it's worked surprisingly well in most cases.

I made a website that needed two modal images, one on the top and one on the bottom. I wanted them to be enlarged when they were clicked on. I found a load of guides for getting one to work, but I couldn't get both to work. A few minutes with a prompt got it working. It didn't help me to learn JavaScript, but did give me working code that I needed quickly.

I've used it to fluff up some text. I'm not very good at making things sound good in text, so it helped a lot.

The latest one I've tried is getting camera settings for a dark gig setup. I was able to give it an old photo that was under exposed but gave an accurate impression of the room, and ask for recommended settings with the same lens, a new lens, and a flash. It gave me a selection of settings with and without the flash, including settings for rear curtain sync, so when it leaves a ghost trail behind the subject. It's nothing I couldn't figure out, but would have taken a bit more trial and error in the room. I probably wouldn't have thought of the ghost trails.

I've found lots of great uses. I find LLMs are great for grammar and spellchecking, acting as a sounding board, doing translations, writing shell scripts, digging through unfamiliar code bases, figuring out configurations for tools, finding relevant stuff in large documents, and they can be helpful for coding in languages I'm not well versed in.

My take on it is that it's just a tool, and as with most tools you can use it in a sensible way that's positive, although many people choose not to. So as an example, I work in a creative field and I see a lot of people relying on it to do their creative work for them, which I don't really agree with. What I use it for is kind of like an assistant to handle all the admin crap that usually gets in the way of doing creative stuff. So sometimes you have to write form letters, grant things etc. - basically formal stuff that wouldn't require any creative thinking if you did it by yourself anyway, but still eats up time and brain power. I just give that stuff to the AI, make sure it sounds vaguely presentable, and send it off. I could also see a use case for it in areas where I'm weaker like marketing my stuff, maybe for at least coming up with an outline strategy of some sort, although I haven't really tried that out yet.

Essentially, AI will do your creative stuff for you if you let it, or you can just use it to handle the day-to-day piddly crap to free yourself up to do the creative stuff yourself. It's up to you really.

LLMs trained exclusively on documentation and ran locally seem like they'd be nice. Basically the next step in search algorithms. Do note that I am not talking about having an AI summary at the top of every web search page, that's harmful.

In short, teaching myself simple stuff.

I have a workflow that translates English srt files to my desired target language. It’s a great use case bc LLMs are proficient at picking up the nuances of language translations, especially related to idioms and the like.

It has been great at estimating calories in things. When possible, I compared to the actual food label, and it's usually within a reasonable margin of error. But not everything is labeled, and when you're on a diet it's better to have at least something to go off of.