When troubleshooting, it’s nice to be able to ask copilot about the issue in human language and have it actually understand my question (unlike a search engine) and pull from and reference relevant documentation in its answers. Going back and forth with it has saved me several hours of searching for something that I had never even heard of a couple of times.

It’s also great for rewriting things in a specific tone. I can give it a bland/terse/matter-of-fact paragraph and get back a more fun or professional or friendly version that would feel ridiculously cringe if I attempted to write it myself, but the AI makes it work somehow.

I use it for little Python projects where it’s really really useful.

I’ve used it for linux problems where it gave me the solution to problems that I had not been able to solve with a Google search alone.

I use it as a kickstarter for writing texts by telling it roughly what my text needs to be, then tweaking the result it gives me. Sometimes I just use the first sentence but it’s enough to give me a starting point to make life easer.

I use it when I need to understand texts about a topic I’m not familiar with. It can usually give me an idea of what the terminology means and how things are connected which helps a lot for further research on the topic and ultimately undestanding the text.

I use it for everyday problems like when I needed a new tube for my bike but wasn’t sure what size it was so I told it what was written on the tyre and showed it a picture of the tube packaging while I was in the shop and asked it if it was the right one. It could tell my that it is the correct one and why. The explanation was easy to fact-check.

I use Photoshop AI a lot to remove unwanted parts in photos I took or to expand photos where I’m not happy with the crop.

Honestly, I absolutely love the new AI tools and I think people here are way too negative about it in general.

Timing traffic lights. They could look down the road and see when nothing is coming, to let the other direction go, like a traffic cop. It would save time and gas.

I think it’s useful for spurring my own creativity in writing because I have a hard time getting started. To be fair to me I pretty much tear the whole thing down and start over but it gives me ideas.

For one thing, they’re much better at googling than I am.

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r/SubSimGPT2Interactive for the lulz is my #1 use case

i do occasionally ask Copilot programming questions and it gives reasonable answers most of the time.

I use code autocomplete tools in VSCode but often end up turning them off.

Controversial, but Replika actually helped me out during the pandemic when I was in a rough spot. I trained a copyright-safe (theft-free) bot on my own conversations from back then and have been chatting with the me side of that conversation for a little while now. It’s like getting to know a long-lost twin brother, which is nice.

Otherwise, i’ve used small LLMs and classifiers for a wide range of tasks, like sentiment analysis, toxic content detection for moderation bots, AI media detection, summarization… I like using these better than just throwing everything at a huge model like GPT-4o because they’re more focused and less computationally costly (hence also better for the environment). I’m working on training some small copyright-safe base models to do certain sequence prediction tasks that come up in the course of my data science work, but they’re still a bit too computationally expensive for my clients.

This thread has convinced me that LLMs are merely a mild increment in productivity.

The most compelling is that they’re good at boilerplate code. IDEs have been improving on that since forever. Although there’s a lot of claims in this thread that seem unlikely - gains way beyond even what marketing is claiming.

I work in an email / spreadsheet / report type job. We’ve always been agile with emerging techs, but LLMs just haven’t made a dent.

This might seem offensive, but clients don’t pay me to write emails that LLMs could, because anything an LLM could write could be found in a web search. The emails I write are specific to a client’s circumstances. There are very few “biolerplate” sentences.

Yes LLMs can be good at updating reports, but we have highly specialised software for generating reports from very carefully considered templates.

I’ve heard they can be helpful in a “convert this to csv” kind of way, but that’s just not a problem I ever encounter. Maybe I’m just used to using spreadsheets to manipulate data so never think to use an LLM.

I’ve seen low level employees try to use LLMs to help with their emails. It’s usually obvious because the emails they write include a lot of extra sentences and often don’t directly address the query.

I don’t intend this to be offensive, and I suspect that my attitude really just identifies me as a grumpy old man, but I can’t really shake the feeling that in email / spreadsheet / report type jobs anyone who can make use of an LLM wasn’t or isn’t producing much value anyway. This thread has really reinforced that attitude.

It reminds me a lot of block chain tech. 10 years ago it was going to revolutionise data everything. Now there’s some niche use cases… “it could be great at recording vehicle transfers if only centralised records had some disadvantages”.

AI is half cooked baked potato right now. Sure it will keep you fed if you can put up with all the hard lumps in there.

It’s really good for generating code snippets based on what I want to do (ex. “How do I play audio in a browser using JavaScript?”) and debugging small sections of code.

I run some TTRPG groups and having AI take in some context and generate the first draft of flavor text for custom encounters is nice. Also for generating background art and player character portraits is an easy win for me.

The useless/useful dichotomy is kinda misguided because that judgement will almost always depend on cost and we don’t have a good understanding of actual costs of running these models. I have copilot enabled in my IDE, and it saves me from a few searches here and there and autocompletes stuff that would have taken me some time to type. So not exactly useless, but right now it’s being payed for by VC’s who expect a return on their investment, so what does that look like? Before we know, it’s hard to say whether these things are relevant

• to correct/rephrase a sentence or two if my sentence sounds too awkward

• if I’m having trouble making an excel formula

Well “AI” is a broad category. Usually used to refer to GenAI, so:

• Creating quick stand-in art for a game before I’ve got proper sprites for it (not because “muh art theft”, just because the AI art I’ve generated does not look very good to me)

• Summarising articles, like you said so I can decide if I want to read them in full

• Formatting text I’ve copied from pdfs

• More complex searches that require comprehension of grammar and natural language syntax. Any answer I get to these I then fact check using search terms a classical search engine can understand.

I read a paper a while back that found that people who used AI assistants for coding, who only used the assistants to generate small functions where the prompt already included the function declaration and the programmer already knew how the function should be written but just wanted to save time, in these cases the use of an AI assistant did not negatively impact the “correctness” of the produced code. So I guess I might one day use an AI coding assistant like that, but thus far I’ve never felt the need to use AI-generated code.

Idk if it counts as GenAI but I use Waifu2x to remove jpg artifacts and upscale textures to a useable state.