thorbot , 3 months ago

I use it daily to generate basic Perl scripts that I cant be bothered to write myself. It’s fantastic.

FellowEnt , 3 months ago

It's sped up my retouching workflows. I can automate things that a few years ago would've needed quite a lot of time spent with manual brush work.

Also in the creative industries, it's a massive time saver for conceptual work. Think storyboarding and scamping, first stage visuals that kind of thing.

tiredofsametab , 3 months ago

The one thing I can say for sure is that, sometimes, when I library or something has bad documentation it might be able to give a solution quicker than diving I to the source code

doctorcrimson , 3 months ago

It's great for duping stupid people. There are no ethical benefits to the current LLM AI on the market.

It's got potential for use in research such as identifying potential medications to work with certain diseases based on molecular structure, something that would take a normal human countless hours but a machine could do in seconds, but AFAIK that field is a very tiny fraction of the market.

Mamertine , 3 months ago

I work in IT for a Fortune 500 org.

We use LLMs to improve worker efficiency. There is a ton of taking info from here and there and entering it into our system. AI took the workload from humans doing data entry and freed the humans up to do less tedious things.

doctorcrimson , 3 months ago

As I said, absolutely unethical. Even if the error percentage was the same or less than that of a human, which I really don't believe given the human inputs were training data so even at 100% accuracy the LLM would be as flawed as a human, then still in any industry where decisions are being made which impact people like accounting, forensics, logistics etc then having a machine making all of those decisions without contextual awareness is a disaster waiting to happen.

But yeah you don't have to convince me that fortune 500 CEOs are cheap assholes cutting costs, I believe you there.

Teal , 3 months ago

One of the better uses I’ve heard of is in search and rescue type situations. Using AI to find specific items, people or anomalies on a map or video feed can be helpful.

An example regarding wildfires:

California turns to AI to help spot wildfires

Drewelite , 3 months ago

This sort of feels like someone using a PC for the first time in 1989 and asking what it does that they can't do on a piece of paper with a calculator. They may not have been far off at the time, but they would be missing the point. This is a paradigm shift that allows for a single application to fulfill the role of, eventually, infinite applications. And yes it starts with mundane tasks. You know, the kind people don't want to do themselves.

doctorcrimson , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

TBF if a mathematician or a programmer cannot do it on paper then they've kind of failed and probably won't have any notable impact. Paper math didn't end when consumer computers came about.

deafboy , 3 months ago

Wrap it up, climate scientists, the show is over! This lad said he can do your job without the supercomputer.

doctorcrimson , 3 months ago

You think Supercomputers are designing and building themselves, you fucking donkey? You think ChatGPT has the solution to Climate Change?

Drewelite , 3 months ago

I know plenty of modern programmers who are empowered by the ease at which they can learn the trade now. Some never go deeper than front end developer, because there's good money there. That job would look nothing like it does today if it had to be done by hand.

doctorcrimson , 3 months ago

Ah yes, the html programmers. Top minds of our generation, them. /s

Cris_Color , 3 months ago

The problem is that most of the things it feels we can currently see applications for are... Kinda bad. Actually repulsive frankly. Like I don't want those things. I don't wanna talk to an ai to order my big mac or instead of just getting a highlighted excerpt from a webpage when I search things. I don't want a world where artists have to compete with image generators to make a living, or where weird creepy porn that chases and satisfies ever more unrealistic expectations is the norm. I don't want to talk to chat bots that use statistical analysis to convincingly sell me lies they don't understand.

I just wanna talk to actual people. I wanna see art made by people, I wanna look at pictures of the bodies of actual human beings, I wanna see the animations that humans poured their soul into, I wanna see the actual text a person wrote on the subject I'm researching. I wanna do simple things, in simple ways, and the world that it feels like AI companies are offering us honestly sucks, and as soon as that door is fully opened things will just be permanently worse. Convenience is great but I don't want a robot to feed me a weird gross regurgitation of reality or approximation of human interaction to me like a bird that chews and digests its food for its babies. I don't wanna consume the spit-up of an overgrown algorithm. Its a gross idea of how we could engage with the world. It obfuscates the humanity of whatever it touches, and the humanity is the worthwhile part. There comes a point where the abstraction is abstracting away everything of value and leaving you with the most sanitized version.

If ai was just gonna be used to improve medicine and translate books or webpages, or as interactive accsessibiltiy tool, or do actually helpful shit maybe I wouldn't be so opposed to it, but it feels like everything consumer or employee facing that ai is offering is awful and something I absolutely do not want. But companies don't care, and that shitty world is gonna be the reality cause it's profitable

Drewelite , 3 months ago

Well then I guess I'd ask you to reconsider your answer but from the perspective of 1989. I'd imagine that'd be the same answer you'd give to the personal computer. AI isn't going to make things more complicated It's going to make things simpler. But people will create a more complicated (diverse) world in the vacuum that leaves. Just like an ox pulled plow made it easier to till farmland led to more complex agricultural societies. This type of advancement has been the story of human history since its beginning. Your perspective seems most concerned with people using this advancement against you, but our future now holds the possibility of having this AI on your side.

Using it to synopsize complicated TOS that corporations use to obfuscate what you're agreeing to, actually answering questions instead of needing to search through ad riddled web pages, allowing more people to become artists and create their vision.

Your examples of useful ways to use AI are great. So help build or support them. If you only look at the future corporations are selling you, yeah, it's going to look like a bleak corporate nightmare. But the truth is technology empowers the individual. So we need to do something good with that power.

Kolanaki , 3 months ago

Anything that requires tons of iteration can be done way faster with AI. Finding new chemical formulas for medicine, as an example. It takes a "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" approach, but it's still more effective than a human.

hellothere , 3 months ago

Brute force is AI now?

mounderfod , 3 months ago

Presumably in order to determine whether the eg chemical is worth looking at in the first place

BlueMagma , 3 months ago

brute force would be "throw at the wall one at a time until one stick"

Silentiea , 3 months ago

As long as everything gets thrown it's still brute force, but the reason they use ai for it is because it can throw a lot more a lot faster.

doctorcrimson , 3 months ago

I think by broad definitions it can be, yes.

Think about it. AI is just throwing a ton of sample data in and filtering out the results that are least correct.

Meron35 , 3 months ago

Maybe you only do an "odd bit" of mundane writing and the image/music generation is a gimmick, but a lot of the modern world is mundane and pays people lots of money for mundane work. E.g. think of those internal corporate videos which require a script, stock photography and footage, basic corporate music following a 4 chord progression, a voiceover, all edited into a video.

Steve Taylor is most famous for being the voiceover for Kurzgesagt videos, but more generally he's a voiceover artist that features in lot of these boring corporate videos. This type of content has such high demand there is an entire industry dedicated towards it, which seems well suited to AI.

https://youtu.be/vDb2h1-7LA0

This does raise further ethical/economical issues though, as most people in these creative industries actually require income from this boring work to get by.

doctorcrimson , 3 months ago

So you're saying it's really good at theft from common folks for the benefit of corporations?

Xtallll , 3 months ago

This does raise further ethical/economical issues though, as most people in these creative industries actually require income from this boring work to get by.

That sounds more like a problem with capitalism than AI.

Silentiea , 3 months ago

This, tbh.

Let's get a ubi or something going

KingThrillgore , 3 months ago

Depends on what kind of AI. In gaming, AI is part of the process to entertain and challenge the player, and has even been used to help model life systems.

I have yet to see how useful LLMs can be outside of being blatant plagarists but for a time, projects like AI Dungeon really did push the emphasis on "interactive dynamic narratives" and it was really fun for a while.

ML has been an important part in fraud detection for at least a decade now.

Flumpkin , 3 months ago

Have you tried out writing prompts for an image generating AI? If you have some idea and play around with it it's quite a new thing. And extension of human imagination. YMMV

AI is helping us to correctly predict protein folding which will enable new medication. Afaik it's a major breakthough that could allow alleviating a lot of suffering.

CrayonRosary , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Don't limit your thoughts to just generative AI, which is what you are talking about. Chat bot and media generation aren't the only uses for AI (by which I mean any trained neural network program that can do some sort of task.

Motor skills

AI can solve learn to solve the marble maze "Labyrinth" much, much faster than a human, and then speedrun it faster than any human ever has. Six hours. That's how long it took a brand new baby AI to beat the human world record. A human that has been learning hand-eye coordination and fine motor control all of it's life, with a brain which evolved over millions of years to do exactly that.

No special code needed. The AI didn't need to be told how balls roll or knobs turn, or how walls block the ball. It earned all of that on the fly. The only special code it had was optical and mechanical. It knew it had "hands" in the form of two motors, and it knew how to use them. It also had eyes (a camera), and access to a neural network computer vision system. When the AI started taking illegal shortcuts, and they had to instruct it to follow the prescribed path, which is printed on the maze.

Robots could in work factories, mines, and other dangerous, dehumanizing jobs. Why do we want workers to behave like robots at a factory job? Replace them with actual robots and let them perform a human job like customer service.

Think of a robot that has actual hands and arms, feet and legs, and various "muscles". We have it learn it's motor control using a very accurate physics system on a computer that simulates its body. This allows the AI to learn at much faster speeds than by controlling a real robot. We can simulate thousands of robots in parallel and run the simulations much faster than real time. Train it to learn how to use it's limbs and eyes to climb over obstacles, open doors and detain or kill people. We could replace police with them. Super agile robot cops with no racial bias or other prejudices. Arresting people and recording their crimes. Genuine benefit.

Computer Vision

AI can be trained to recognize objects, abstract shapes, people's individual faces, emotions, people's individual body shape, mannerisms, and gait. There are many genuine benefits to such systems. We can monitor every public location with cameras and an AI employing these tools. This would help you find lost loved ones, keep track of your kids as they navigate the city, and track criminal activity.

By recording all of this data, tagged with individual names, we can spontaneously view the public history of any person in the world for law enforcement purposes. Imagine we identify a person as a threat to public safety 10 years from now. We'd have 10 years of data showing everyone they've ever associated with and where they went. Then we could weed out entire networks of crime at once by finding patterns among the people they've associated with.

AI can even predict near future crime from an individual's recent location history, employment history, etc. Imagine a person is fired from his job then visits a gun store then his previous place of employment. Pretty obvious what's going on, right? But what if it happens over the period of two weeks? Difficult for a human to detect a pattern like this in all the noise of millions of people doing their everyday tasks, but easy for an AI. Genuine benefit.

Managing Production

With enough data and processing power, we can manage the entire economy without the need for capitalism. People's needs could be calculated by an AI and production can be planned years ahead of time to optimize inputs and outputs. The economy--as it stands today--is a distributed network of human brains and various computers. AI can eliminate the need for the humans, which is good because humans are greedy and neurotic. AI can do the same job without either. Again, human's are freed to pursue human endeavors instead of worrying about making sure each farm and factory has the resources it needs to feed and clothe everyone. Genuine benefit.

Togetherness

We will all be part of the same machine working in harmony instead of fighting over how to allocate resources. Genuine benefit!

JohnSwanFromTheLough , 3 months ago

Says the AI...

doctorcrimson , 3 months ago

Even if it turns out to be organic, that wordwall is shill as fuck.

Silentiea , 3 months ago

I was with it until it said let's train AI robots to kill people, and then use them to track every face on the planet and use that data to "identify threats"...

OP wants a robot overseer, but also wants it to be a police state.

Flumpkin , 3 months ago

Nice post. A while back I read something on reddit about a theory for technological advances always being used for the worst possible nightmare scenario. But I can't find it now. Fundamentally I'm a technological optimist but I can't even yet fully imagine the subtle systemic issues this will cause. Except the rather obvious one:

Algorithms on social media decide what people see and that shapes their perception of the world. It is relatively easy to manipulate in subtle ways. If AI can learn to categorize the psychology of users and then "blindly anticipate" what and how they will respond to stimuli (memes / news / framing) then that will in theory allow for a total control by means of psychological manipulation. I'm not sure how close we are to this, the counter argument would be that AI or LLMs currently don't understand at all what is going on, but public relations / advertising / propaganda works on emotional levels and doesn't "have to make sense". The emotional logic is much easier to categorize and generate. So even if there is no blatant evil master plan just optimizing for max profit, max engagement, could make the AI pursue (dumbly) a broad strategy that is more evil than that.

GiveMemes , 3 months ago

Another great one is science! Machine learning is used for physics, bio, and chem models, in things such as genetic sequencing and generation of new drugs as well as very useful in figuring out protein folding. It's very useful in all of the iterative "grunt work" so to speak. While it may not be the best at finding effective new drugs, it can certainly arrange molecules according to the general rules of organic chemistry much faster than any human, and because of that has already led to several drug breakthroughs. AI is hugely useful! LLMs are mostly hype

Mnemnosyne , 3 months ago

Don't discount the generative AI either!

Language generating AI like LLMs:
Though we're in early stages yet and they don't really work for communication, these are going to be the foundation on which AI learns to talk and communicate information to people. Right now they just spit out correct-sounding responses, but eventually the trick to using that language generation to actually communicate will be resolved.

Image/video/music generating AI:
How difficult it is right now, for the average person to illustrate an idea or visual concept they have! But already these image generating AI are making such illustration available to the common person. As they advance further and adjusting their output based on natural conversational language becomes more effective, this will only get better. A picture paints a thousand words...and now the inverse will also be true, as anyone will be able to create a picture with sufficient description. And the same applies to video and music.

That said I love your managing production point. It's something I e been thinking too - centrally planned economies have always had serious issues, but if with predictive AI we can overcome the problems by accurately predicting future need, the problems with them may be solvable, and we can then take advantage of the inherent efficiency in such a planned system.

CrayonRosary , 3 months ago

That's funny because the whole post was sarcastically outlining a distopian nightmare.

If that kind of stuff was actually to become real, some dictator would take control of it and subjugate the entire country, or world... forever. There'd be no way to resist that level of surveillance or machine policing.

NeatNit , 3 months ago

I think each one of those dystopian ideas can be done in a safe and humane way, but needless to say it is not the current trajectory.

Asudox , 3 months ago

Well written!

Silentiea , 3 months ago

Train it to learn how to use it's limbs and eyes to climb over obstacles, open doors and detain or kill people. We could replace police with them. Super agile robot cops with no racial bias or other prejudices. Arresting people and recording their crimes. Genuine benefit.

I got as far as ai cops and became sceptical. Like, yeah, sure, but what you're describing isn't just a robot being controlled by an AI, it's also the ai making decisions and choosing who to pursue and such, which is a known weakness right now.

And then you let them kill people.

CrayonRosary , 3 months ago

Well, yeah. They are told to put down their weapon. They get 20 seconds to comply. If they don't, they get killed.

Pyr_Pressure , 3 months ago

Lots of it's actual AI. Nothing we have at the moment I would actually qualify as true AI. It's just algorithms spitting out and answers what it interprets your question as. They don't think or create anything, just regurgitate things in predefined patterns.

AnarchistArtificer , 3 months ago

An interesting point that I saw about a trail on one of the small, London Tube stations:

• most of the features involved a human who could come and assist or review the footage. The AI being able to flag wheelchair users was good because the station doesn't have wheelchair access with assistance.

• when they tried to make a heuristic for automatically flagging aggressing people, they found that people with the arms up tend to be aggressive. This flagging system led to the unexpected feature that if a Transport For London (TFL) staff member needed assistance (i.e. if medical assistance was necessary, or if someone was being aggressive towards them, the TFL staff member could put their arms up to bring the attention onto them.

That last one especially seems neat. It seems like the kind of use case where AI has the most power when it's used as a tool to augment human systems, rather than taking humans out of stuff.

talentedkiwi , 3 months ago

While not AI. That's my goal with my home automation. To augment my life to make certain things easier and/or more efficient.

https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/01/19/perfect-home-automation/

doctorcrimson , 3 months ago

"Once implemented, the system was able to identify many black men who were then immediately confronted. Confrontations with black men are now documented at 87% of aggressive confrontations in TFL locations." /sarcasm

I don't think designing AI to make generalizations based on physical appearances is a very good idea to start with.

funkless_eck , 3 months ago

something I'm not seeing here is business applications in supply chain. Managing forward-stocking warehouses, monitoring shipping lanes and ordering for seasonality, as well as identifying anomalies such as chargebacks, stock outs, outlier returns/damages/failures is typically managed by a handful of people mixing spreadsheets, ERP databases, and emailing people to tell them "your light bulbs are stuck in the suez canal and your recent batch of cables have a defect"

AI can replace these systems with ML, and use LLMs to generate the notifications.

blackstampede , 3 months ago

My partner and I have founded a company that uses custom AI models trained on research to (partially) automate the process of peer review and replication. We can identify mistakes and some types of fraud in research to aid reviewers as well as extract methods and equations from papers and automatically verify findings. If you know anything about the state of research right now, those are some incredibly large benefits.