Comment on Jensen Huang says relentless negativity around AI is hurting society and has "done a lot of damage"
mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca 4 days agowhat mundane tasks do you find it useful for?
so far the only useful thing I’ve found (outside of being another search engine) is processing image to text, but I’m pretty sure it’s just using existing OCR tools to do that (not sure, I haven’t used it much because I only needed to do it once like a year ago)
mechoman444@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I use it primarily as a text editor for grammar checking and for analyzing confusing or poorly structured text. I also use it as a search engine quite frequently. I can ask direct questions and receive the information I want, presented in a way that suits my needs. I have used it to help construct responses to inquiries from several companies I work with. It is particularly effective at generating corporate-style responses that appeal to middle management, which has been genuinely useful over the past couple of years. I no longer have to sit and overanalyze how to phrase emails. What used to take a significant amount of time and mental effort is now handled efficiently. In that regard, it has been extremely helpful.
At the end of the day it’s just a tool and a tool is only as good as its user. I work in the repair industry and I utilize very expensive high quality tools and I also have some very very cheap ones because they have some unique use cases only they are suited for.
I also use OCR on my phone every single day. It’s really great for copying and pasting model and serial numbers and doing very quick basic searches. Although I find this to be more of a convenience than anything else.
Where AI features have failed specifically on my phone is the text-to-speech and the autocorrect for typing, especially on the Google keyboard it oftentimes tries to guess what the best words would be and it fails miserably most of the time.
mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
thanks for the detailed reply. the proof is in the end product - as long as it is used with an appropriate understanding of its output, anything can be useful.
obviously I can’t say for sure how many AI emails I have gotten, but I can say that I’ve gotten some that are obviously AI where I skip over it because of that. it’s just excessively wordy and if somebody couldn’t have been bothered to be concise, I can’t be bothered to read it - I very much ascribe to the belief that somebody should not have to put in extra effort because the person requesting something didn’t. but if you have it working for you, then great. I do think that that is a good use case if it is dialed in — if it’s got the right style and verbosity, it’s much easier to just review something and tweak it than it is to write it all out from scratch.
I have found it helpful as a search engine when I don’t know the exact terms that I need to be searching for, but that’s about it. It’s just the initial search, and then once I know where I’m going I can use regular means to get the rest, because it really breaks down once you start asking it very specific stuff in my experience (engineering stuff). but again, I haven’t really needed to use it too many times.
One other time that I did find it helpful was when I didn’t know a particular API function call, and I just could not figure it out from the documentation or what I knew of the API. it got me the function I needed (although did not at all understand how to actually use it lol, but that was fine because I just needed to get there and then use the documentation for the rest).
I have a demo for an AI tool soon that is supposed to automatically create engineered parts drawings. I am very skeptical, but we’ll see how it goes. my expectation at this time is that it will only be good for very basic parts, not even moderate complexity, which means it’s functionally useless for me. if it’s turning out drawings at the quality level of a junior designer, that doesn’t help me — I need those juniors to turn those out so they can improve and do the same on the moderate complexity stuff. if they don’t have the opportunity on the simple stuff, then they won’t improve to handle the more difficult stuff that the tool cannot. and those simple drawings can be churned out in a minute each, often, so the time savings are just not there on that type of part.
mechoman444@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Indeed, I don’t use AI for anything complex. It can’t physically fix an appliance, aside from providing technical data. It can tell me the ohm range for a thermistor or the microfarad rating a capacitor should have. Surprisingly, it does this far more reliably than Google or other search engines. Ironically, AI is better at delivering accurate data in this domain precisely because traditional searches are increasingly cluttered with low-quality AI-generated content.