There are some great use cases, for instance transcribing handwritten records and making them searchable is really exciting to me personally. They can also be a great tool if you learn to work with them (perhaps most importantly, know when not to use them - which in my line of work is most of the time).

That being said, none of these cases, or any of the cases in this thread, is going to return the large amounts of money now being invested in AI.

I generate D&D characters and NPCs with it, but that’s not really a strong argument.

For programming though it’s quite handy. Basically a smarter code completion that takes the already written stuff into account. From machine code through assembly up to higher languages, I think it’s a logical next step to be able to tell the computer, in human language, what you actually are trying to achieve. That doesn’t mean it is taking over while the programmer switches off their brain of course, but it already saved me quite some time.

I think genAI would be pretty neat for bit banging tests, aka. Throwing semi-random requests and/or signals at some device in the hopes of finding obscure edge-cases or security holes.

It’s pretty good at looking up readily available knowledge that doesn’t have a lot of nuance to it. There’s a lot of stuff you can look up but it always comes with a grain of salt.

Home remedies, bunch of baby facts like poop color meaning, recipes and adjustments, programming examples (requires very prompting skills).

Rewriting stuff into business English is another very nice use case. Tell the AI your qualitifations, ask to make a cover letter for “job description” then review. Drafting text and summarising also pretty good.

Adding modifiers to questions like “list of 20 for X” for a brainstorming or “include how scientifically reliable the claim is on scale of 1-10” really help with getting a good answer and some nuance to whatever claims.

It’s touted as the be all end all but in reality the use cases are very specific in my experience.

I’d say there are probably as many genuine use-cases for AI as there are people in denial that AI has genuine use-cases.

Top of my head:

• Text editing. Write something (e.g. e-mails, websites, novels, even code) and have an LLM rewrite it to suit a specific tone and identify errors.
• Creative art. You claim generative AI art is soulless and poor quality, to me, that indicates a lack of familiarity with what generative AI is capable of. There are tools to create entire songs from scratch, replace the voice of one artist with another, remove unwanted background noise from songs, improve the quality of old songs, separate/add vocal tracks to music, turn 2d models into 3d models, create images from text, convert simple images into complex images, fill in missing details from images, upscale and colourise images, separate foregrounds from backgrounds.
• Note taking and summarisation (e.g. summarising meeting minutes or summarising a conversation or events that occur).
• Video games. Imagine the replay value of a video game if every time you play there are different quests, maps, NPCs, unexpected twists, and different puzzles? The technology isn’t developed enough for this at the moment, but I think this is something we will see in the coming years. Some games (Skyrim and Fallout 4 come to mind) have a mod that gives each NPC AI generated dialogue that takes into account the NPC’s personality and history.
• Real time assistance for a variety of tasks. Consider a call centre environment as one example, a model can be optimised to evaluate calls based on language and empathy and correctness of information. A model could be set up with a call centre’s knowledge base that listens to the call and locates information based on a caller’s enquiry and tells an agent where the information is located (or even suggests what to say, though this is currently prone to hallucination).

Another point valid for GPTs is getting started on ideas and things, sorting out mind messes, getting useful data out of large amounts of clusterfucks of text, getting a general direction.

Current downsides are you cannot expect factual answers on topics it has no access to as it’ll hallucinate on these without telling you, many GPT provides use your data so you cannot directly ask it sensitive topics, it’ll forget datapoints if your conversation goes on too long.

As for image generation, it’s still often stuck in the uncanny valley. Only animation topics benefit right now within the amateur realm. Cannot say how much GPTs are professionally used currently.

All of these are things you could certainly do yourself and often better/faster than an AI. But sometimes you just need a good enough solution and that’s where GPTs shine more and more often. It’s just another form of automation - if used for repetitive/stupid tasks, it’s fine. Just don’t expect it to just build you a piece of fully working bug-free software just by asking it. That’s not how automation works. At least not to date.

I know they are being used to, and are decently good for, extracting a single infornation from a big document (like a datasheet). Considering you can easily confirm the information is correct, it’s quite a nice use case

I think LLMs could be great if they were used for education, learning and trained on good data. The encyclopedia Britannica is building an AI exclusively trained on its data.

It also allows for room for writers to add more to the database, to provide broader knowledge for the AI, so people keep their jobs.

What doesn’t exist yet, but is obviously possible, is automatic tweening. Human animators spend a lot of time drawing the drawings between other drawings. If they could just sketch out what’s going on, about once per second, they could probably do a minute in an hour. This bullshit makes that feasible.

We have the technology to fill in crisp motion at whatever framerate the creator wants. If they’re unhappy with the machine’s guesswork, they can insert another frame somewhere in-between, and the robot will reroute to include that instead.

We have the technology to let someone ink and color one sketch in a scribbly animatic, and fill that in throughout a whole shot. And then possibly do it automatically for all labeled appearances of the same character throughout the project.

We have the technology to animate any art style you could demonstrate, as easily as ink-on-celluloid outlines or Phong-shaded CGI.

Please ignore the idiot money robots who are rendering eye-contact-mouth-open crowd scenes in mundane settings in order to sell you branded commodities.

I use it to sort days and create tables which is really helpful. And the other thing that really helped me and I would have never tried to figure out on my own:

I work with the open source GIS software qgis. I’m not a cartographer or a programmer but a designer. I had a world map and wanted to create geojson files for each country. So I asked chatgpt if there was a way to automate this within qgis and sure thing it recommend to create a Python script that could run in the software, to do just that and after a few tweaks it did work. that saved me a lot of time and annoyances. Would it be good to know Python? Sure but I know my brain has a really hard time with code and script. It never clicked and likely never will. So I’m very happy with this use case. Creative work could be supported in a drafting phase but I’m not so sure about this.

I have had some decent experiences with Copilot and coding in C#. I’ve asked it to help me figure out what was wrong with a LINQ query I was doing with an XDocument and it pointed me in the right direction where I figured it out. It also occasionally has some super useful auto complete blocks of code that actually match the pattern of what I’m doing.

As for art and such, sometimes people just want to see some random bizarre thing realized visually that they don’t have the ability (or time/dedication) to realize themselves and it’s not something serious that they would be commissioning an artist for anyway. I used Bing image creator recently to generate a little character portrait for an online DND game I’m playing in since I couldn’t find quite what I was looking for with an image search (which is what I usually do for those).

I’ve seen managers at my job use it to generate fun, relevant imagery for slideshows that otherwise would’ve been random boring stock images (or just text).

It has actual helpful uses, but every major corporation that has a stake in it just added to or listened to the propaganda really hard, which has caused problems for some people; like the idiot who proudly fired all of his employees because he replaced all their jobs with automation and AI, then started hunting for actual employees to hire again a couple months later because everything was terrible and nothing worked right.

They’re just tools that can potentially aid people, but they’re terrible replacements for actual people. I write automated tests for a living, and companies will always need people for that. If they fired me and the other QAs tomorrow, things would be okay for a short while thanks to the automation we’ve built, but as more and more code changes go into our numerous and labyrinthine systems, more and more bugs would get through without someone to maintain the automation.

It has value in natural language processing, like turning unstructured natural language data into structured data. Not suitable for all situations though, like situations that cannot tolerate hallucinations.

Its also good for reorganizing information and presenting it in a different format; and also classification of semantic meaning of text. It’s good for pretty much anything dealing with semantic meaning, really.

I see people often trying to use generative AI as a knowledge store, such as asking an AI assistant factual questions, but this is an invalid usecase.

If you don’t know what you are doing and ask LLMs for code then you are gonna waste time debugging it without understanding but if you are just asking it for boiler plate stuff, or are asking it to add comments and print outs to console for existing code for debugging, it’s really great for that. Sometimes it needs chastising or corrections but so do humans.

I find it very useful but not worth the environmental cost or even the monetary cost. With how enshittified Google has become now though I find that ChatGPT has become a necessary evil to find reliable answers to simple queries.

Video generators are going to eat Hollywood alive. A desktop computer can render anything, just by feeding in a rough sketch and describing what it’s supposed to be. The input could be some kind of animatic, or yourself and a friend in dollar-store costumes, or literal white noise. And it’ll make that look like a Pixar movie. Or a photorealistic period piece starring a dead actor. Or, given enough examples, how you personally draw shapes using chalk. Anything. Anything you can describe to the point where the machine can say it’s more [thing] or less [thing], it can make every frame more [thing].

Boring people will use this to churn out boring fluff. Do you remember Terragen? It’s landscape rendering software, and it was great for evocative images of imaginary mountains against alien skies. Image sites banned it, by name, because a million dorks went ‘look what I made!’ and spammed their no-effort hey-neat renders. Technically unique - altogether dull. Infinite bowls of porridge.

Creative people will use this to film their pet projects without actors or sets or budgets or anyone else’s permission. It’ll be better with any of those - but they have become optional. You can do it from text alone, as a feral demo that people think is the whole point. The results are massively better from even clumsy effort to do things the hard way. Get the right shapes moving around the screen, and the robot will probably figure out which ones are which, and remove all the pixels that don’t look like your description.

The idiots in LA think they’re gonna fire all the people who write stories. But this gives those weirdos all the power they need to put the wild shit inside their heads onto a screen in front of your eyeballs. They’ve got drawers full of scripts they couldn’t hassle other people into making. Now a finished movie will be as hard to pull off as a decent webcomic. It’s gonna get wild.

And this’ll be great for actors, in ways they don’t know yet.

Audio tools mean every voice actor can be a Billy West. You don’t need to sound like anything, for your performance to be mapped to some character. Pointedly not: “mapped to some actor.” Why would an animated character have to sound like any specific person? Do they look like any specific person? Does a particular human being play Naruto, onscreen? No. So a game might star Nolan North, exclusively, without any two characters really sounding alike. And if the devs need to add a throwaway line later, then any schmuck can half-ass the tone Nolan picked for little Suzy, and the audience won’t know the difference. At no point will it be “licensing Nolan North’s voice.” You might have no idea what he sounds like. He just does a very convincing… everybody.

Video tools will work the same way for actors. You will not need to look like anything, to play a particular character. Stage actors already understand this - but it’ll come to movies and shows in the form of deep fakes for nonexistent faces. Again: why would a character have to look like any specific person? They might move like a particular actor, but what you’ll see is somewhere between motion-capture and rotoscoping. It’s CGI… ish. And it thinks perfect photorealism is just another artistic style.

Idea generation.

E.g., I asked an LLM client for interactive lessons for teaching 4th graders about aerodynamics, esp related to how birds fly. It came back with 98% amazing suggestions that I had to modify only slightly.

A work colleague asked an LLM client for wedding vow ideas to break through writer’s block. The vows they ended up using were 100% theirs, but the AI spit out something on paper to get them started.