With copilot included in Professional-grade Office 365 and some politician claiming that their government should use AI to be more efficient. I am curious on whether some of you did use “AI” to get some productive things done. Or if it’s still mostly a toy for you.
My physics professor has us compare our answers to physics problems with a LLM’s output. Somehow, the AI is even worse at physics then I am, it once simplified (4pi2) to 4.
Are you in my class?
Absolutely. I’ve used it to write basic scripts that I didn’t feel like spending time on. I’ve also used it to write cover letters. I always make sure to peruse through it to see what it did and make sure it works or sounds right.
I use it as a glorified Google search since Google search is absolute dogshit these days. But that’s about it. ChatGPT is one of the most over hyped bullshit I’ve ever seen in my life.
You shouldn’t use it for search like that. They (Gemini and ChatGPT) love to be confidently incorrect. Their perfect grammar trick you into believing their answers, even when they are wildly inaccurate.
I use GPT in the sense of “I need to solve X problem, are there established algorithms for this?” which usually gives me a good starting point for actual searching.
Most recent use-case was judging the similarity of two strings: I had never heard of “Levenschtein distance” before, but once I had that keyword it was easy to work from there.
Also: cmake and bash boilerplate
Describing a concept and getting the term is awesome with an LLM.
I’ve found documentation and discussions of various strategies I’m considering in tech work.
I describe my idea, the LLM gives me the existing term for that strategy, and then I can find discussion, guides, and theory about that. Keeps me from reinventing the wheel.
I use FastGPT on Kagi and it lists the sources for its conclusions, so it’s like a better aimed search
Copilot is actually linked directly into their search engine and it provides the links it pulls its data from. But you’re correct, ChatGPT is not hooked into the live internet and should not be used for such things. I’m not sure if Gemini is or not since I haven’t used it or looked into it much, so I can’t comment on it.
That’s not correct. ChatGPT is hooked into the live web.
I think I’m going to disagree with the accuracy statement.
Yes - AIs can be famously inaccurate. But so can web pages - even reputable ones. In fact, any single source of information is insufficient to be relied upon, if accuracy is important. And today, deliberate disinformation on the internet is massive - it’s something we don’t even know the scale of because the tools to check it may be compromised. </tinfoilhat>
It takes a lot of cross-referencing to be certain of something, and most of us don’t bother if the first answer from either method ‘feels right’.
AI does get shown off when it’s stupidly wrong, which is to be expected, but the world doesn’t care when it’s correct time and again. And each iteration gets better at self-checking facts.
I have it provide me with its sources
As if Google is any better
Absolutely agree!! LLMs are good for quick “shallow” search for me (stuff I would find on google in a few minutes). Bad for “deeper” learning (because it’s not capable of doing it). It’s overhyped.
It seems like exactly the moment google’s successor showed up, google has a stroke. it’s awful these days
I’ve used it productively this week by…
- Summarising and finding relevant parts of Microsoft Teams meetings.
- Finding relevant parts of the labyrinthine policies I have to comply with.
- Quickly finding out what’s going on with corporate events in the market.
- Generating SQL code instead of starting with a blank document (I can never remember the exact way to declare various structures)
- At home, feeding private documents into Ollama for insight and producing compliance reports.
- Instructions for stepping through flashing some temperature sensors.
Used it as a toy for the longest time but by now I had to do a lot of coding and I was actually able to make good use of code completion AI.
Saved me about a quarter of my time. Definitely worth something. (FYI I use supermaven free tier).
Also I’m using ChatGPT to ask dumb questions because that way I don’t have to constantly interrupt other people. And also as a starting point to research something. I usually start with ChatGPT, then Google specific jargon and depending on the depth of the topic I will read either studies, articles or forum threads afterwards.
It did take me a long time to figure out which AI and when to use it, so mandating this onto the entire government is a gong show more than anything.
No AI is not useless, but it’s always a very specific use case.
If you’re interested, I suggest using the free ChatGPT version to ask dumb questions together with Google to get a feel for what you get. Then you can better decide if it’s worth it for you.
The amount of shit we have to clean up from devs using AI generated code nowadays is insane. Some people are using it to generate the bulk of their code and the output can be trash tier.
I was supposed to have a nice long weekend to rest and I spent most of it cleaning up after clients who pushed AI generated code into production that froze all data processing. Even after we found the problem and fixed it for them, the data didn’t catch up until yesterday afternoon. The entire holiday I had to spend with a laptop a few feet away on a Teams call because a dev used AI-gen code.
I am not saying that it isn’t helpful to your situation. What I am saying is that a growing number of outfits are starting to depend on “devs” who’s code is mostly LLM generated, and they push it without understanding what it does or how it interacts with the environment they are deploying it in.
Yeah. I think AI literacy is a real thing and should be taken seriously. Before generating everyone should internalize the boundaries and limitations of any model used.
If you have a hammer, everything’s a nail. And that reflex exists with AI as well, so everyone who uses is has to be careful in regards to that.
Same.
Gen AI is very helpful when you’re working on modifying or filling holes in code.
ChatGPT is very useful for coding.
Messed around for a while and then nothing. Not sure if I’m being AI-averse but i really can’t find good use for it.
I find that the very best use case of LLMs are in the name it self–language. I can check my text is grammatically correct or not for example
Claude sonnet 3.5 and GPT 4o are good for coding
I use it to summarize work notes.
My work often involves talking a lot of observation notes and I used to spend a lot of time sifting through them to make the actual summaries and analyses. Now AI basically does my first draft and I can even ask it to highlight examples of different things from my notes. It honestly saves me a lot of time and effort but also proves to me that on it’s own, AI still isn’t good enough to beat a real human expert, it’s just WAY faster and gets me like 70~80% of the way there in seconds. I was at a conference just a few weeks back and found at least one other person in my field of work doing the same and a lot more people were looking to adopt it for this kind of use specifically after our discussions.
This practice is banned at our company and it is a fireable offence. We also do not allow for code to be shown or shared on Teams. If there is ANY confidential information or even proprietary internal subject matters in your notes, you are essentially feeding it to the AI to plagiarize.
Nothing that would be proprietary, I don’t work in software or tech. And a simple find and replace all gets rid of any confidential or personal information before I paste it into any AI. Redacting and/or concealing confidential info has been a thing I’ve had to do way before AI
No. I have never and do not use AI in my art and never will
It taught me the way of unix.
I used to be afraid of the terminal in linux. Now i am eager to try openbsd.
I use it to outline and layout big documents and reports. I give it a list of tasks I did and it writes the long-form text in the approved style. I use it anytime I need to translate my thoughts or process into corporate jargon. And occasionally my bosses ask me for a report on something totally unrelated to what we are doing and I’ll ask GPT to do the first pass on the topic and then come I’ll back and re-write it iteratively as I figure out what part of the topic the boss really cares about.
Pretty useful for software engineering, particularly helpful in writing a test suite, you still need to actually check the output though ofc
Also made use of it for writing my end of year review to solve the blank page problem, I find it a lot easier to edit down than starting HR stuff like that entirely from scratch
I wanted to update the logo for my business, I tried hiring an artist though a number I know from having working for various comic cons. No luck, so I went to friends i knew that were artists, got strung along with no results. Tried hiring via Craigslist and Reddit, got garbage.
I was out $1600 with nothing to show for it except some sketches that were no where near what I wanted. So I tried using AI. It was horrid. Anything that was half decent was cropped and unusable.
FYI, in the future, just use Fiverr. I had the same problems when helping my wife get her business logo created. People either wanted a ridiculous amount of money for a simple logo ($1500+ and formal contracts) or like $100-200 just for prototyping to start and then another $100-200 for final image (the latter was commonplace on the freelance artist subreddits). I went with a couple artists on Reddit and they completely missed on what she wanted, despite us providing ample examples and our own rough sketch ideas.
She ended up finding a local artist through a friend who captured the logo exactly how she pictured it, and it ended up costing around $150. Ironically, I didn’t know she did that, and I’d hit up a random artist on Fiverr who came very close to what the local artist did and it was only like $50.
Sorry for the tangent, I was just somewhat surprised at how complicated and potentially expensive getting a simple logo created. I know artists gotta eat, but some of them wanted more than what plumbers or electricians ask for, which is crazy to me.
I have graphic design experience and a whole bunch of free time at work. I’d be willing to do whatever you need for free.
