I promise this question is asked in good faith. I do not currently see the point of generative AI and I want to understand why there’s hype. There are ethical concerns but we’ll ignore ethics for the question.

In creative works like writing or art, it feels soulless and poor quality. In programming at best it’s a shortcut to avoid deeper learning, at worst it spits out garbage code that you spend more time debugging than if you had just written it by yourself.

When I see AI ads directed towards individuals the selling point is convenience. But I would feel robbed of the human experience using AI in place of human interaction.

So what’s the point of it all?

  • Affidavit@lemm.ee
    61·
    7 hours ago

    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).