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?
It’s kinda handy if you don’t want to take the time to write a boring email to your insurance or whatever.
I sorta disagree though, based on my experience with llms.
The email it generates will need to be read carefully and probably edited to make sure it conveys your point accurately. Especially if it’s related to something as serious as insurance.
If you already have to specifically create the prompt, then scrutinize and edit the output, you might as well have just written the damn email yourself.
It seems only useful to write slop that doesn’t matter that only gets consumed by other machines and dutifully logged away in a slop container.
For us who are bad at writing though that’s exactly why we use it. I’m bad with greetings, structure, things that people expect and I’ve had people get offended at my emails because they come off as rude. I don’t notice those things. For that llms have been a godsend. Yes, I of course have to validate it, but it conveys the message I’m trying to usually
It does sort of solve the ‘blank page problem’ though IMO. It sometimes takes me ages to start something like a boring insurance letter because I open up LibreOffice and the blank page just makes me want to give up. If I have AI just fart out a letter and then I start to edit it, I’m already mid-project so it actually does save me some time in that way.
Yeah that’s how I use it, essentially as an office intern. I get it to write cover letters and all the other mindless piddly crap I don’t want to do so I can free up some time to do creative things or read a book or whatever. I think it has some legit utility in that regard.
People keep meaning different things when they say “Generative AI”. Do you mean the tech in general, or the corporate AI that companies overhype and try to sell to everyone?
The tech itself is pretty cool. GenAI is already being used for quick subtitling and translating any form of media quickly. Image AI is really good at upscaling low-res images and making them clearer by filling in the gaps. Chatbots are fallible but they’re still really good for specific things like generating testing data or quickly helping you in basic tasks that might have you searching for 5 minutes. AI is huge in video games for upscaling tech like DLSS which can boost performance by running the game at a low resolution then upscaling it, the result is genuinely great. It’s also used to de-noise raytracing and show cleaner reflections.
Also people are missing the point on why AI is being invested in so much. No, I don’t think “AGI” is coming any time soon, but the reason they’re sucking in so much money is because of what it could be in 5 years. Saying AI is a waste of effort is like saying 3D video games are a waste of time because they looked bad in 1995. It will improve.
AI is huge in video games for upscaling tech like DLSS which can boost performance by running the game at a low resolution then upscaling it, the result is genuinely great
frame gen is blurry af and eats shit on any fast motion. rendering games at 640x480 and then scaling them to sensible resolutions is horrible artistic practice.
rendering games at 640x480 and then scaling them to sensible resolutions is horrible artistic practice.
Is that a reason a lot of pixel art games are looking like shit? I remember the era of 320x240 and 640x480 and the modern pixel art are looking noticeably worse.
that’s probably more to do with a lack of dithering and not using tubes anymore. lots of those older games looked better on crt than they do on digital
For coding it works really well if you give it examples like “i have code that looked like this … And i made it to look like this … If i give you another piece of code that’s similar to the first can you convert it to the second for me”. Been great to reduce the amount of boring grunt work so I can focus on the more fun stuff
In C#, when programming save/load in video games, it can be super tedious. I am self taught and i didnt have the best resources, so the only way i could find to ensure its saving the correct variables was to manually input every single variable into a text file. I dont care if its plaintext, if people want to edit their save then more power to them. The issue is that there are potentially tens of hundreds of different variables that need to be saved for the gamestate to be accurately recreated.
So its really nice that i can just copy/paste my classes into gpt and give it the syntax for a single variable to be saved, then have it do the rest. I do have to browse through and ensure its actually getting all the variables, but it turns a potentially mindnumbing 4 hour long process into maybe a 20 minute one thats relatively engaging.
Also if you know a better way lmk. I read that you can simply hash the object into a text file and then unhash it, but afaik unhashing something is next to impossible and i could never figure it out anyways.
You could encrypt and decrypt it with keys.
Or you can do something simple like scramble the letters like a cypher, still able to edit manually but it wouldn’t be as readable and obvious what everything does.
Or you can can encode it, same issue as the last but they’ll have to know what it was encoded with to decode it before editing.
Or you can just turn it into bytes so the file is more awkward to work with.
You could probably mix a bunch of these together if you care enough. U don’t think any are THE standard and foolproof but they’re options
The goal isnt to encrypt the data, i dont care if its plaintext. The goal is to find a way to save an object in c# without having to save each individual variable.
I use it for parsing through legalese or terms and conditions. IT IS NOT PERFECT. I wouldn’t trust it ever over a lawyer. But it’s great for things like “Is there anything here that is extra unusual or weirdly anti-consumer or very bad for privacy?”. I think it’s great for that.
People here are just “it will take jobs it’s inherently evil”. They said the same about Photoshop, and computers before. I think there are evil uses for it sure, but that doesn’t mean that it has no valid usages
shitposting.
Need some weidly specific imagery about whatever you’re going on about? It got you covered
