Comment on Why I am not impressed by A.I.

• scarabic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  We have one that indexes all the wikis and GDocs and such at my work and it’s incredibly useful for answering questions like “who’s in charge of project 123?” or “what’s the latest update from team XYZ?”

  I even asked it to write my weekly update for MY team once and it did a fairly good job. The one thing I thought it had hallucinated turned out to be something I just hadn’t heard yet. So it was literally ahead of me at my own job.

  I get really tired of all the automatic hate over stupid bullshit like this OP. These tools have their uses. It’s very popular to shit on them. So congratulations for whatever agreeable comments your post gets. Anyway.

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• slaacaa@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I have it write for me emails in German. I moved there not too long ago, works wonders to get doctors appointment, car service, etc. I also have it explain the text, so I’m learning the language.

  I also use it as an alternative to internet search, which is now terrible. It’s not going to help you to find smg super location specific, but I can ask it to tell me without spoilers smg about a game/movie or list metacritic scores in a table, etc.

  It also works great in summarizing long texts.

  LLM is a tool, what matters is how you use it. It is stupid, it doesn’t think, it’s mostly hype to call it AI. But it definitely has it’s benefits.

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• verdigris@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I mean, I would argue that the answer in the OP is a good one. No human asking that question honestly wants to know the sum total of Rs in the word, they either want to know how many in “berry” or they’re trying to trip up the model.

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• lime@feddit.nu ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  i’m still not entirely sold on them but since i’m currently using one that the company subscribes to i can give a quick opinion:

  i had an idea for a code snippet that could save be some headache (a mock for primitives in lua, to be specific) but i foresaw some issues with commutativity (aka how to make sure that a + b == b + a). so i asked about this, and the llm created some boilerplate to test this code. i’ve been chatting with it for about half an hour, and had it expand the idea to all possible metamethods available on primitive types, together with about 50 test cases with descriptive assertions. i’ve now run into an issue where the __eq metamethod isn’t firing correctly when one of the operands is a primitive rather than a mock, and after having the llm link me to the relevant part of the docs, that seems to be a feature of the language rather than a bug.

  so in 30 minutes i’ve gone from a loose idea to a well-documented proof-of-concept to a roadblock that can’t really be overcome. complete exploration and feasibility study, fully tested, in less than an hour.

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• chaosCruiser@futurology.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Here’s a bit of code that’s supposed to do stuff. I got this error message. Any ideas what could cause this error and how to fix it? Also, add this new feature to the code.

  Works reasonably well as long as you have some idea how to write the code yourself. GPT can do it in a few seconds, debugging it would take like 5-10 minutes, but that’s still faster than my best. Besides, GPT also fairly fluent in many functions I have never used before. My approach would be clunky and convoluted, while the code generated by GPT is a lot shorter.

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  • Windex007@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    That makes sense as long as you’re not writing code that needs to know how to do something as complex as …checks original post… count.

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• chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Ask it for a second opinion on medical conditions.

  Sounds insane but they are leaps and bounds better than blindly Googling and self prescribe every condition there is under the sun when the symptoms only vaguely match.

  Once the LLM helps you narrow in on a couple of possible conditions based on the symptoms, then you can dig deeper into those specific ones, learn more about them, and have a slightly more informed conversation with your medical practitioner.

  They’re not a replacement for your actual doctor, but they can help you learn and have better discussions with your actual doctor.

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  • noodlejetski@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    sounds like a perfectly sane idea freethoughtblogs.com/…/ai-anatomy-is-weird/

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  • Wogi@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    So can web MD. We didn’t need AI for that. Googling symptoms is a great way to just be dehydrated and suddenly think you’re in kidney failure.

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    • chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      We didn’t stop trying to make faster, safer and more fuel efficient cars after Model T, even though it can get us from place A to place B just fine. We didn’t stop pushing for digital access to published content, even though we have physical libraries. Just because something satisfies a use case doesn’t mean we should stop advancing technology.

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      • Wogi@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        We also didn’t make the model T suggest replacing the engine when the oil light comes on. Cars, as it happens, aren’t that great at self diagnosis, despite that technology being far simpler and further along than generative models are. I don’t trust the model to tell me what temperature to bake a cake at, I’m sure at hell not going to trust it with medical information. Googling symptoms was risky at best before. It’s a horror show now.

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      • spankmonkey@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        AI is slower and less efficient than the older search algorithms and is less accurate.

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• TheHobbyist@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  One thing which I find useful is to be able to turn installation/setup instructions into ansible roles and tasks. If you’re unfamiliar, ansible is a tool for automated configuration for large scale server infrastructures. In my case I only manage two servers but it is useful to parse instructions and convert them to ansible, helping me learn and understand ansible at the same time.

  Here is an example of instructions which I find interesting: how to setup docker for alpine Linux: wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Docker

  Results are actually quite good even for smaller 14B self-hosted models like the distilled versions of DeepSeek, though I’m sure there are other usable models too.

  To assist you in programming (both to execute and learn) I find it helpful too.

  I would not rely on it for factual information, but usually it does a decent job at pointing in the right direction. Another use i have is helpint with spell-checking in a foreign language.

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• L3s@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Writing customer/company-wide emails is a good example. “Make this sound better: we’re aware of the outage at Site A, we are working as quick as possible to get things back online”

  Another is feeding it an article and asking for a summary, hackingne.ws does that for its Bsky posts.

  Coding is another good example, “write me a Python script that moves all files in /mydir to /newdir”

  Asking for it to summarize a theory, “explain to me why RIP was replaced with RIPv2, and what problems people have had since with RIPv2”

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  • lurch@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    it’s not good for summaries. often gets important bits wrong, like embedded instructions that can’t be summarized.

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    • L3s@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      My experience has been very different, I do have to sometimes add to what it summarized though. The Bsky account is mentioned is a good example, most of the posts are very well summarized, but every now and then there will be one that isn’t as accurate.

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  • spankmonkey@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The dumbed down text is basically as long as the prompt. Plus you have to double check it to make sure it didn’t have outrage instead of outage just like if you wrote it yourself.

    Are you really saving time?

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    • L3s@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Yes, I’m saving time. As I mentioned in my other comment:

      Yeah, normally my “Make this sound better” or “summarize this for me” is a longer wall of text that I want to simplify, I was trying to keep my examples short.

      And

      and helps correct my shitty grammar at times.

      And

      Hallucinations are a thing, so validating what it spits out is definitely needed.

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      • spankmonkey@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        How do you validate the accuracy of what it spits out?

        Why don’t you skip the AI and just use the thing you use to validate the AI output?

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    • earphone843@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Dumbed down doesn’t mean shorter.

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      • spankmonkey@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        If the amount of time it takes to create the prompt is the same as it would have taken to write the dumbed down text, then the only time you saved was not learning how to write dumbed down text. Plus you need to know what dumbed down text should look at to know if the output is dumbed down but still accurate.

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  • Corngood@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Make this sound better: we’re aware of the outage at Site A, we are working as quick as possible to get things back online

    How does this work in practice? I suspect you’re just going to get an email that takes longer for everyone to read, and doesn’t give any more information (or worse, gives incorrect information). Your prompt seems like what you should be sending in the email.

    If the model (or context?) was good enough to actually add useful, accurate information, then maybe that would be different.

    I think we’ll get to the point really quickly where a nice concise message like in your prompt will be appreciated more than the bloated, normalised version, which people will find insulting.

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    • locuester@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Yes, people are using it as the least efficient communication protocol ever.

      One side asks an LLM to expand a summary into a fluff filled email, and the other side asks an LLM to reduce the long email to a summary.

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    • earphone843@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      It works well. For example, we had a work exercise where we had to write a press release based on an example, then write a Shark Tank pitch to promote the product we came up with in the release.

      I gave AI the link to the example and a brief description of our product, and it spit out an almost perfect press release. I only had to tweak a few words because there were specific requirements I didn’t feed the AI.

      Then I told it to take the press release and write the pitch based on it.

      Again, very nearly perfect with only having to change the wording in one spot.

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    • L3s@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Yeah, normally my “Make this sound better” or “summarize this for me” is a longer wall of text that I want to simplify, talking to non-technical people about a technical issue is not the easiest for me, and AI has helped me dumb it down when sending an email.

      As for accuracy, you review what is gives you, you don’t just copy and send it without review. Also you will have to tweak some pieces that it gives out where it doesn’t make the most sense, such as if it uses wording you wouldn’t typically use. It is fairly accurate though in my use-cases.

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      • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        I think these are actually valid examples, albeit ones that come with a really big caveat; you’re using AI in place of a skill that you really should be learning for yourself. As an autistic IT person, I get the struggle of communicating with non-technical and neurotypical people, especially clients who you have to be extra careful with. But the reality is, you can’t always do all your communication by email. If you always rely on the AI to correct your tone or simplify your language, you’re choosing not to build an essential skill that is every bit as important to doing your job well as it is to know how to correctly configure an ACL on a Cisco managed switch.

        That said, I can also see how relying on the AI at first can be a helpful learning tool as you build those skills. There’s certainly an argument that by using tools, but paying attention to the output of those tools, you build those skills for yourself. Learning by example works. I think used in that way, there’s potentially real value there.

        Which is kind of the broader story with Gen AI overall. It’s not that it can never be useful; it’s that, at best, it can only ever aspire to “useful.” No one, yet, has demonstrated any ability to make AI “essential” and the idea that we should be investing hundreds of billions of dollars into a technology that is, on its best days, mildly useful, is sheer fucking lunacy.

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      • otp@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        As for accuracy, you review what it gives you, you don’t just copy and send it without review.

        Yeah, I don’t get why so many people seem to not get that.

        It’s like people who were against Intellisense in IDEs because “What if it suggests the wrong function?”…you still need to know what the functions do. If you find something you’re unfamiliar with, you check the documentation. You don’t just blindly accept it as truth.

        Just because it can’t replace a person’s job doesn’t mean it’s worthless as a tool.

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