Are there any genuine benefits to AI?

Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨fiddlestix@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

I can see some minor benefits - I use it for the odd bit of mundane writing and some of the image creation stuff is interesting, and I knew that a lot of people use it for coding etc - but mostly it seems to be about making more cash for corporations and stuffing the internet with bots and fake content. Am I missing something here? Are there any genuine benefits?

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SorteKanin@feddit.dk ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Much like automated machinery, it could in theory free the workers to do more important, valuable work and leave the menial stuff for the machine/AI. In theory this should make everyone richer as the companies can produce stuff cheaper and so more of the profits can go to worker salaries.

Unfoetunately what happens is that the extra productivity doesn’t go to the workers, but just let’s the owners of the companies take more of the money with fewer expenses. Usually rather firing the human worker rather than giving them a more useful position.

So yea I’m not sure myself tbh

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- SinningStromgald@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  No no you found the actual “use” for AI as far as businesses go. They don’t care about the human cost of adopting AI and firing large swaths of workers just profits.
  
  Which is why governments should be quickly moving to highly regulate AI and it’s uses. But governments are slow plodding things full of old people who get confused with toasters.
  
  As always capitalism kills.
  
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  - fiddlestix@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    This is the part that bothers me the most, I think.
    
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- themurphy@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  This already happened with the industrial revolution. It did make the rich awfully rich, but let’s be honest. People are way better off today because of it.
  
  It’s not perfect, but it does help in the long run. Also, there’s a big difference in which country you’re in.
  
  Capitalist-socialism will be way better off than hard core capitalism, because the mind set and systems are already in place to let it benefit the people more.
  
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  - deafboy@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yes, that way the government will be able to make sure it benefits the right people. And we will call it the national socialism… wait… no!
    
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- doctorcrimson@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The question wasn’t "In Theory, are there any genuine benefits" it was if there are currently right now.
  
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Bjornir@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Medical use is absolutely revolutionary. From GP’s consultations to reading tests results, radios, AI is already better than humans and will be getting better and better.

Computers are exceptionally good at storing large amount of data, and with ML they are great at taking a lot of input and inferring a result from that. This is essentially diagnosing in a nutshell.

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- yesman@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I read that one LLM was so good at detecting TB from Xrays that they reverse engineered the “black box” code hoping for some insight doctors could use. Turns out, the AI was biased toward the age of the Xray machine that took each photo because TB is more common in developing countries that have older equipment. Womp Womp.
  
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  - sunbeam60@lemmy.one ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    A large language model was used to detect TB in X-ray? Do you not just mean Machine Learning?
    
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  - ViscloReader@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    What’s TB?
    
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  - PrincessLeiasCat@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    That’s super interesting, TIL
    
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- fiddlestix@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I hadn’t considered this. It’s interesting stuff. My old doctor used to just Google stuff in front of me and then repeat the info as if I hadn’t been there for the last five minutes.
  
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gorysubparbagel@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Most email spam detection and antimalware use ML. There are use cases in medicine with trying to predict whether someone has a condition early

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- Lemminary@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It’s also being used in drug R&D to find similar compounds like antimicrobial activity, afaik.
  
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Drewelite@lemmynsfw.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
This sort of feels like someone using a PC for the first time in 1989 and asking what it does that they can’t do on a piece of paper with a calculator. They may not have been far off at the time, but they would be missing the point. This is a paradigm shift that allows for a single application to fulfill the role of, eventually, infinite applications. And yes it starts with mundane tasks. You know, the kind people don’t want to do themselves.

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- Cris_Color@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The problem is that most of the things it feels we can currently see applications for are… Kinda bad. Actually repulsive frankly. Like I don’t want those things. I don’t wanna talk to an ai to order my big mac or instead of just getting a highlighted excerpt from a webpage when I search things. I don’t want a world where artists have to compete with image generators to make a living, or where weird creepy porn that chases and satisfies ever more unrealistic expectations is the norm. I don’t want to talk to chat bots that use statistical analysis to convincingly sell me lies they don’t understand.
  
  I just wanna talk to actual people. I wanna see art made by people, I wanna look at pictures of the bodies of actual human beings, I wanna see the animations that humans poured their soul into, I wanna see the actual text a person wrote on the subject I’m researching. I wanna do simple things, in simple ways, and the world that it feels like AI companies are offering us honestly sucks, and as soon as that door is fully opened things will just be permanently worse. Convenience is great but I don’t want a robot to feed me a weird gross regurgitation of reality or approximation of human interaction to me like a bird that chews and digests its food for its babies. I don’t wanna consume the spit-up of an overgrown algorithm. Its a gross idea of how we could engage with the world. It obfuscates the humanity of whatever it touches, and the humanity is the worthwhile part. There comes a point where the abstraction is abstracting away everything of value and leaving you with the most sanitized version.
  
  If ai was just gonna be used to improve medicine and translate books or webpages, or as interactive accsessibiltiy tool, or do actually helpful shit maybe I wouldn’t be so opposed to it, but it feels like everything consumer or employee facing that ai is offering is awful and something I absolutely do not want. But companies don’t care, and that shitty world is gonna be the reality cause it’s profitable
  
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  - Drewelite@lemmynsfw.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Well then I guess I’d ask you to reconsider your answer but from the perspective of 1989. I’d imagine that’d be the same answer you’d give to the personal computer. AI isn’t going to make things more complicated It’s going to make things simpler. But people will create a more complicated (diverse) world in the vacuum that leaves. Just like an ox pulled plow made it easier to till farmland led to more complex agricultural societies. This type of advancement has been the story of human history since its beginning. Your perspective seems most concerned with people using this advancement against you, but our future now holds the possibility of having this AI on your side.
    
    Using it to synopsize complicated TOS that corporations use to obfuscate what you’re agreeing to, actually answering questions instead of needing to search through ad riddled web pages, allowing more people to become artists and create their vision.
    
    Your examples of useful ways to use AI are great. So help build or support them. If you only look at the future corporations are selling you, yeah, it’s going to look like a bleak corporate nightmare. But the truth is technology empowers the individual. So we need to do something good with that power.
    
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- doctorcrimson@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  TBF if a mathematician or a programmer cannot do it on paper then they’ve kind of failed and probably won’t have any notable impact. Paper math didn’t end when computers came about.
  
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  - deafboy@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Wrap it up, climate scientists, the show is over! This lad said he can do your job without the supercomputer.
    
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  - Drewelite@lemmynsfw.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I know plenty of modern programmers who are empowered by the ease at which they can learn the trade now. Some never go deeper than front end developer, because there’s good money there. That job would look nothing like it does today if it had to be done by hand.
    
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Paragone@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
They are the greatest gift to solo-brainstorming that I’ve ever encountered.

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- doctorcrimson@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The fruit of those brainstorming sessions are like Homer Simpson designing a new car.
  
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  - boatswain@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    You’re confusing brainstorming with content generation. LLMs are great for brainstorming: they can quickly churn out dozens of ideas for my D&D campaign, which I then look through, discard the garbage, keep the good bits of, and riff off of before incorporating into my campaign. If I just used everything it suggested blindly, yeah, nightmare fuel. For brainstorming though, it’s fantastic.
    
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QuadratureSurfer@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
AI is a very broad topic. Unless you only want to talk about Large Language Models (like ChatGPT) or AI Image Generators (Midjourney) there are a lot of uses for AI that you seem to not be considering.

It’s great for upscaling old videos: (this would fall under image generating AI since it can be used for colorizing, improving details, and adding in additional frames) so that you end up with something like: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ1OgQL9_Cw

It’s useful for scanning an image for text and being able to copy it out (OCR).

It’s excellent if you’re deaf, or sitting in a lobby with a muted live broadcast and want to see what is being said with closed captions (Speech to Text).

Flying your own drone with object detection/avoidance.

There’s a lot more, but basically, it’s great at taking mundane tasks where you’re stuck doing the same (or similar) thing over, and over, and over again, and automating it.

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- fiddlestix@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yeah that’s interesting.
  
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- doctorcrimson@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I think most of those are only labelled AI to generate tech hype, though? Like, sure, machine learning and maybe even LLM can and are used for those, but it isn’t a machine given human discernable input and pretending to give human output.
  
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  - QuadratureSurfer@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    “AI” is the broadest umbrella term for any of these tools. That’s why I pointed out that OP really should be a bit more specific as to what they mean with their question.
    
    AI doesn’t have the same meaning that it had over 10 years ago when we used to use it exclusively for machines that could think for themselves.
    
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Kolanaki@yiffit.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Anything that requires tons of iteration can be done way faster with AI. Finding new chemical formulas for medicine, as an example.

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- hellothere@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Brute force is AI now?
  
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  - BlueMagma@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    brute force would be “throw at the wall one at a time until one stick”
    
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  - doctorcrimson@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I think by broad definitions it can be, yes.
    
    Think about it. AI is just throwing a ton of sample data in and filtering out the results that are least correct.
    
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  - mounderfod@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Presumably in order to determine whether the eg chemical is worth looking at in the first place
    
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Rooki@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
AI has some interesting use cases, but should not be trusted 100%.

Like github copilot ( or any “code copilot”):

Good for repeating stuff but with minor changes

Can help with common easy coding errors

Code quality can take a big hit

For coding beginners, it can lead to a deficit of real understanding of your code
( and because of that could lead to bugs, security backdoors… )

Like brief translation:

Good translation of the common/big languages ( english, german…)

Can extend a brief summary to a big wall of text ( and back )

If wrong translated it can lead to that someone else understands it wrong and it misses the point

It removes the “human” part. It can be most of the time depending on the context easily identified.

But dont do anything that is IMPORTANT with AI, only use it for fun or if you know if the code/text the AI wrote is correct!
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- Lemminary@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Adding to the language section, it’s also really good at guessing words if you give it a decent definition. I think this has other applications but it’s quite useful for people like me with the occasionally leaky brain.
  
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  - Rooki@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I have sometimes the same issue!
    
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- fiddlestix@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Actually the summaries are good, but you have to know some of it anyway and then check to see if it’s just making stuff up. That’s been my experience.
  
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sunbeam60@lemmy.one ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
AI is a revolution in learning.

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- themurphy@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Very true. I learned how to code surprisingly fast.
  
  And even the mistakes the AI made was good, because it made me learn so much seeing what changes it did to fix it.
  
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  - doctorcrimson@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Bullshit. Reading a book on a language is just as fast and it doesn’t randomly lie or make up entire documentations as an added bonus.
    
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- doctorcrimson@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I don’t believe you, this seems like a bot posting.
  
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AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
An interesting point that I saw about a trail on one of the small, London Tube stations:

most of the features involved a human who could come and assist or review the footage. The AI being able to flag wheelchair users was good because the station doesn’t have wheelchair access with assistance.

when they tried to make a heuristic for automatically flagging aggressing people, they found that people with the arms up tend to be aggressive. This flagging system led to the unexpected feature that if a Transport For London (TFL) staff member needed assistance (i.e. if medical assistance was necessary, or if someone was being aggressive towards them, the TFL staff member could put their arms up to bring the attention onto them.

That last one especially seems neat. It seems like the kind of use case where AI has the most power when it’s used as a tool to augment human systems, rather than taking humans out of stuff.
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- doctorcrimson@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  “Once implemented, the system was able to identify many black men who were then immediately confronted. Confrontations with black men are now documented at 87% of aggressive confrontations in TFL locations.” /sarcasm
  
  I don’t think designing AI to make generalizations based on physical appearances is a very good idea to start with.
  
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- talentedkiwi@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  While not AI. That’s my goal with my home automation. To augment my life to make certain things easier and/or more efficient.
  
  https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/01/19/perfect-home-automation/
  
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CrayonRosary@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Don’t limit your thoughts to just generative AI, which is what you are talking about. Chat bot and media generation aren’t the only uses for AI (by which I mean any trained neural network program that can do some sort of task.

Motor skills

AI can solve learn to solve the marble maze “Labyrinth” much, much faster than a human, and then speedrun it faster than any human ever has. Six hours. That’s how long it took a brand new baby AI to beat the human world record. A human that has been learning hand-eye coordination and fine motor control all of it’s life, with a brain which evolved over millions of years to do exactly that.

No special code needed. The AI didn’t need to be told how balls roll or knobs turn, or how walls block the ball. It earned all of that on the fly. The only special code it had was optical and mechanical. It knew it had “hands” in the form of two motors, and it knew how to use them. It also had eyes (a camera), and access to a neural network computer vision system. When the AI started taking illegal shortcuts, and they had to instruct it to follow the prescribed path, which is printed on the maze.

Robots could in factories, mines, and other dangerous, dehumanizing jobs. Why do we want workers to behave like robots in a factory just to get paid? Replace them with actual robots and let them perform a human job like customer service.

Think of a robot that has actual hands and arms, feet and legs, and various “muscles”. We have it learn it’s motor control using a very accurate physics system on a computer that simulates its body. This allows the AI to learn at much faster speeds than by controlling a real robot. We can simulate thousands of robots in parallel and run the simulations much faster than real time. Train it to learn how to use it’s limbs and eyes to climb over obstacles, open doors and detain or kill people. We could replace police with them. Super agile robot cops with no racial bias or other prejudices. Arresting people and recording their crimes. Genuine benefit.

Computer Vision

AI can be trained to recognize objects, abstract shapes, people’s individual faces, emotions, people’s individual body shape, mannerisms, and gait. There are many genuine benefits to such systems. We can monitor every public location with cameras and an AI employing these tools. This would help you find lost loved ones, keep track of your kids as they navigate the city, and track criminal activity.

By recording all of this data, tagged with individual names, we can spontaneously view the public history of any person in the world for law enforcement purposes. Imagine we identify a person as a threat to public safety 10 years from now. We’d have 10 years of data showing everyone they’ve ever associated with and where they went. Then we could weed out entire networks of crime at once by finding patterns among the people they’ve associated with.

AI can even predict near future crime from an individual’s recent location history, employment history, etc. Imagine a person is fired from his job then visits a gun store then his previous place of employment. Pretty obvious what’s going on, right? But what if it happens over the period of two weeks? Difficult for a human to detect a pattern like this in all the noise of millions of people doing their everyday tasks, but easy for an AI. Genuine benefit.

Managing Production

With enough data and processing power, we can manage the entire economy without the need for capitalism. People’s needs could be calculated by an AI and production can be planned years ahead of time to optimize inputs and outputs. The economy–as it stands today–is a distributed network of human brains and various computers. AI can eliminate the need for the humans, which is good because humans are greedy and neurotic. AI can do the same job without either. Again, human’s are freed to pursue human endeavors instead of worrying about making sure each farm and factory has the resources it needs to feed and clothe everyone. Genuine benefit.

Togetherness

We will all be part of the same machine working in harmony instead of fighting over how to allocate resources. Genuine benefit!

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- JohnSwanFromTheLough@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Says the AI…
  
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  - doctorcrimson@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Even if it turns out to be organic, that wordwall is shill as fuck.
    
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- Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Don’t discount the generative AI either!
  
  Language generating AI like LLMs: Though we’re in early stages yet and they don’t really work for communication, these are going to be the foundation on which AI learns to talk and communicate information to people. Right now they just spit out correct-sounding responses, but eventually the trick to using that language generation to actually communicate will be resolved.
  
  Image/video/music generating AI: How difficult it is right now, for the average person to illustrate an idea or visual concept they have! But already these image generating AI are making such illustration available to the common person. As they advance further and adjusting their output based on natural conversational language becomes more effective, this will only get better. A picture paints a thousand words…and now the inverse will also be true, as anyone will be able to create a picture with sufficient description. And the same applies to video and music.
  
  That said I love your managing production point. It’s something I e been thinking too - centrally planned economies have always had serious issues, but if with predictive AI we can overcome the problems by accurately predicting future need, the problems with them may be solvable, and we can then take advantage of the inherent efficiency in such a planned system.
  
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  - CrayonRosary@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    That’s funny because the whole post was sarcastically outlining a distopian nightmare.
    
    If that kind of stuff was actually to become real, some dictator would take control of it and subjugate the entire country, or world… forever. There’d be no way to resist that level of surveillance or machine policing.
    
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- Silentiea@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  Train it to learn how to use it’s limbs and eyes to climb over obstacles, open doors and detain or kill people. We could replace police with them. Super agile robot cops with no racial bias or other prejudices. Arresting people and recording their crimes. Genuine benefit.
  
  I got as far as ai cops and became sceptical. Like, yeah, sure, but what you’re describing isn’t just a robot being controlled by an AI, it’s also the ai making decisions and choosing who to pursue and such, which is a known weakness right now.
  
  And then you let them kill people.
  
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  - CrayonRosary@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Well, yeah. They are told to put down their weapon. They get 20 seconds to comply. If they don’t, they get killed.
    
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- Asudox@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Well written!
  
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- Flumpkin@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Nice post. A while back I read something on reddit about a theory for technological advances always being used for the worst possible nightmare scenario. But I can’t find it now. Fundamentally I’m a technological optimist but I can’t even yet fully imagine the subtle systemic issues this will cause. Except the rather obvious one:
  
  Algorithms on social media decide what people see and that shapes their perception of the world. It is relatively easy to manipulate in subtle ways. If AI can learn to categorize the psychology of users and then “blindly anticipate” what and how they will respond to stimuli (memes / news / framing) then that will in theory allow for a total control by means of psychological manipulation. I’m not sure how close we are to this, the counter argument would be that AI or LLMs currently don’t understand at all what is going on, but public relations / advertising / propaganda works on emotional levels and doesn’t “have to make sense”. The emotional logic is much easier to categorize and generate. So even if there is no blatant evil master plan just optimizing for max profit, max engagement, could make the AI pursue (dumbly) a broad strategy that is more evil than that.
  
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  - GiveMemes@jlai.lu ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Another great one is science! Machine learning is used for physics, bio, and chem models, in things such as genetic sequencing and generation of new drugs as well as very useful in figuring out protein folding. It’s very useful in all of the iterative “grunt work” so to speak. While it may not be the best at finding effective new drugs, it can certainly arrange molecules according to the general rules of organic chemistry much faster than any human, and because of that has already led to several drug breakthroughs. AI is hugely useful! LLMs are mostly hype
    
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FaceDeer@kbin.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I pasted your question verbatim into Bing Chat. Here's what it responded with:

Artificial Intelligence (AI) indeed has a wide range of benefits that extend beyond the ones you’ve mentioned. Here are some areas where AI is making a significant impact:

Healthcare: AI is used in predicting disease outbreaks, drug discovery, personalized treatment plans, and improving patient care. For example, machine learning models can analyze medical images to detect diseases at early stages.

Education: AI can provide personalized learning experiences, identify gaps in learning materials, and automate administrative tasks. It can adapt to individual learning styles, making education more accessible.

Environment: AI can help in climate modeling, predicting natural disasters, and monitoring wildlife. It’s also used in optimizing energy usage in buildings and manufacturing processes, contributing to sustainability.

Transportation: Autonomous vehicles use AI for navigation, safety, and traffic management. AI can also optimize logistics, leading to reduced costs and environmental impact.

Security: AI can enhance cybersecurity by detecting unusual patterns or anomalies in data, helping to prevent cyber attacks. It’s also used in surveillance systems to identify potential threats.

Accessibility: AI can help people with disabilities by providing tools that improve their ability to interact with the world. Examples include speech recognition for those unable to use a keyboard, and visual recognition systems that can describe the environment to visually impaired individuals.

While it’s true that AI can be used to generate profits for corporations, it’s important to remember that many of these advancements also lead to societal benefits. However, like any technology, AI can be misused, and it’s crucial to have regulations and ethical guidelines in place to prevent such misuse. The creation of “bots and fake content” you mentioned is one such misuse, and efforts are ongoing to combat these issues.

In conclusion, AI has the potential to greatly benefit society in many ways, but it’s equally important to be aware of and address its challenges.

Seems like a pretty comprehensive list of the things I'm aware of myself. There's also tons of interesting future applications being worked on that, if they pan out, will be hugely beneficial in all sorts of ways. From what I've seen of what the tech is capable of we're looking at a revolution here.
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- computergeek125@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Seems a bit biased to ask an AI for the benefits of AI…
  Not saying anything specific is wrong, just that appearances matter
  
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  - FaceDeer@kbin.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    It was in part a demonstration. I see a huge number of questions posted these days that could be trivially answered by an AI.
    
    Try asking Bing Chat for negative aspects of AI, it'll give you those too
    
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  - SharkAttak@kbin.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Was thinking the same.. let's ask Honest Joe the car seller which one is the best mean of transport.
    
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  - Chozo@kbin.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I think implying that it has a bias is giving the Advanced Auto Prediction Engine a bit too much credit.
    
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hubobes@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Our software uses ML to detect tax fraud and since tax offices are usually understaffed they can now go after more cases. So yes?

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FellowEnt@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It’s sped up my retouching workflows. I can automate things that a few years ago would’ve needed quite a lot of time spent with manual brush work.

Also in the creative industries, it’s a massive time saver for conceptual work. Think storyboarding and scamping, first stage visuals that kind of thing.

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Meron35@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Maybe you only do an “odd bit” of mundane writing and the image/music generation is a gimmick, but a lot of the modern world is mundane and pays people lots of money for mundane work. E.g. think of those internal corporate videos which require a script, stock photography and footage, basic corporate music following a 4 chord progression, a voiceover, all edited into a video.

Steve Taylor is most famous for being the voiceover for Kurzgesagt videos, but more generally he’s a voiceover artist that features in lot of these boring corporate videos. This type of content has such high demand there is an entire industry dedicated towards it, which seems well suited to AI.

youtu.be/vDb2h1-7LA0

This does raise further ethical/economical issues though, as most people in these creative industries actually require income from this boring work to get by.

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- doctorcrimson@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  So you’re saying it’s really good at theft from common folks for the benefit of corporations?
  
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- Xtallll@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  This does raise further ethical/economical issues though, as most people in these creative industries actually require income from this boring work to get by.
  
  That sounds more like a problem with capitalism than AI.
  
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  - Silentiea@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    This, tbh.
    
    Let’s get a ubi or something going
    
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sunbeam60@lemmy.one ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Someone I know recently published in Nature Communications an enormous study where they used machine learning to pattern match peptides that are clinically significant. Using mass spectrometry, they effectively shoot a sawed off shotgun at a wall then using machine learning to detect pellets that may have interesting effects. This opens up for new understanding in the role peptides play the translational game as well as a potential for a huge amount of new treatments.

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- Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Sounds similar to some of the research my sister has done in her PhD so far. As I understand, she had a bunch of snapshots of proteins from a cryo electron microscope, but these snapshots are 2D. She used ML to construct 3D shapes of different types of proteins. And finding the shape of a protein is important because the shape defines the function. It’s crazy stuff that would be ludicrously difficult and time-consuming to try to do manually.
  
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  - deafboy@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    There was an interesting talk about it at the last CCC. However, I also remember a few reports casting doubts upon the results of this method.
    
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Teal@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
One of the better uses I’ve heard of is in search and rescue type situations. Using AI to find specific items, people or anomalies on a map or video feed can be helpful.

An example regarding wildfires:

California turns to AI to help spot wildfires

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coolkicks@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Lots of boring applications that are beneficial in focused use cases.

Computer vision is great for optical character recognition, think scanning documents to digitize them, depositing checks from your phone, etc. Also some good computer vision use cases for scanning plants to see what they are, facial recognition for labeling the photos in your phone etc…

Also some decent opportunities in medical research with protein analysis for development of medicine, and (again) computer vision to detect cancerous cells, read X-rays and MRIs.

Today all the hype is about generative AI with content creation which is enabled with Transformer technology, but it’s basically just version 2 (or maybe more) of Recurrent Neural Networks, or RNNs. Back in 2015 I remember this essay, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of RNNs being just as novel and exciting as ChatGPT.

We’re still burdened with this comment from the first paragraph, though.

Within a few dozen minutes of training my first baby model (with rather arbitrarily-chosen hyperparameters) started to generate very nice looking descriptions of images that were on the edge of making sense.

This will likely be a very difficult chasm to cross, because there is a lot more to human knowledge than thinking of the next letter in a word or the next word in a sentence. We have knowledge domains where, as an individual we may be brilliant, and others where we may be ignorant. Generative AI is trying to become a genius in all areas at once, and finds itself borrowing “knowledge” from Shakespearean literature to answer questions about modern philosophy because the order of the words in the sentences is roughly similar given a noun it used 200 words ago.

Enter Tiny Language Models. Using the technology from large language models, but hyper focused to write children’s stories appears to have progress with specialization, and could allow generative AI to stay focused and stop sounding incoherent when the details matter.

This is relatively full circle in my opinion, RNNs were designed to solve one problem well, then they unexpectedly generalized well, and the hunt was on for the premier generalized model. That hunt advanced the technology by enormous amounts, and now that technology is being used in Tiny Models, which is again looking to solve specific use cases extraordinarily well.

Still very TBD to see what use cases can be identified that add value, but recent advancements to seem ripe to transition gen AI from a novelty to something truly game changing.

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thorbot@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I use it daily to generate basic Perl scripts that I can be bothered to write myself. It’s fantastic.

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Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
There are lots of things that are very hard to program, but people can do very easily. For example, play Go or recognize that an animal is a bird.

Machine learning/ai makes it competitively simple to make computers do some of these things, but at the cost of efficiency and speed at runtime. This is true if computers vs people as well, a human brain is much slower, less efficient, and less accurate than a calculator.

Machine learning/AI is exciting because it enables computers to quickly be trained to do tasks that were impossible or would have required years of dedicated effort. The tech world is excited about it because whole new enterprises and areas of tech may spring up, big markets that were previously out of reach.

Downsides:

AI uses a lot more electricity. Especially for things that computers can already do, using AI is very inefficient.

Limited control. You train an ai model to do a task, but you don’t have direct control over how it thinks. If chatgpt gives a wrong answer, they can’t just trace the program and figure out why. It takes serious effort to figure out how chatgpt answers simple questions, so figuring out how it gets complex answers or why an answer is wrong is nearly impossible at this point. This also applies to unwanted behaviors,if you had a really good history chatbot who happened to turn out racist, you can’t just turn that off. You end up having to retrain the model, or secretly add “make sure your answer isn’t racist” to every submitted prompt.
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Brkdncr@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The legal industry is going to get turned on its head when AI can read, comment, and write contracts.

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- Jakdracula@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  A 2023 study by researchers at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania and New York University found that “legal services” is among the industries most exposed to occupational change from generative AI.
  
  arxiv.org/pdf/2303.01157.pdf
  
  Another report, published in 2023 by economists at Goldman Sachs, estimated that 44 percent of legal work could be automated by emerging AI tools.
  
  www.ansa.it/documents/1680080409454_ert.pdf
  
  pymnts.com/…/lawyers-who-use-ai-will-replace-thos…
  
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doctorcrimson@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It’s great for duping stupid people. There are no ethical benefits to the current LLM AI on the market.

It’s got potential for use in research such as identifying potential medications to work with certain diseases based on molecular structure, something that would take a normal human countless hours but a machine could do in seconds, but AFAIK that field is a very tiny fraction of the market.

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- Mamertine@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I work in IT for a Fortune 500 org.
  
  We use LLMs to improve worker efficiency. There is a ton of taking info from here and there and entering it into our system. AI took the workload from humans doing data entry and freed the humans up to do less tedious things.
  
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  - doctorcrimson@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    As I said, absolutely unethical. Even if the error percentage was the same or less than that of a human, which I really don’t believe given the human inputs were training data so even at 100% the LLM would be as flawed as a human, then still in any industry where decisions are being made which impact people like accounting, forensics, logistics etc then having a machine making all of those decisions without contextual awareness is a disaster waiting to happen.
    
    But yeah you don’t have to convince me that fortune 500 CEOs are cheap assholes cutting costs, I believe you there.
    
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IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Machine learning is important in healthcare and it’s going to get better and better. If you train an algorithm on two sets of data where one is a collection of normal scans and the other from patients with an abnormality, it’s often more accurate than a medical professional in sorting new scans.

As for the fancy chatbot side of things, I suspect it’s only going to lead to a bunch of middle management dickheads believing they can lay off staff until the inevitable happens and it blows up in their faces.

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funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
something I’m not seeing here is business applications in supply chain. Managing forward-stocking warehouses, monitoring shipping lanes and ordering for seasonality, as well as identifying anomalies such as chargebacks, stock outs, outlier returns/damages/failures is typically managed by a handful of people mixing spreadsheets, ERP databases, and emailing people to tell them “your light bulbs are stuck in the suez canal and your recent batch of cables have a defect”

AI can replace these systems with ML, and use LLMs to generate the notifications.

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tiredofsametab@kbin.run ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The one thing I can say for sure is that, sometimes, when I library or something has bad documentation it might be able to give a solution quicker than diving I to the source code

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sunbeam60@lemmy.one ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Once the technology has embedded, our societal adjustments have completed (and they will be PAINFUL) and assuming the profit of AI is sufficiently taxed for the wealth to redistribute, AI will be seen as the Industrial Revolution x10.

Most likely however, the rich will get richer.

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Lemminary@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I would’ve found it extremely useful in school for studying advanced topics in biology, and now I use it to explain programming concepts to me, or to explain other languages. Some of the answers really do feel like you have a world-class tutor right next to you. It’s not without errors but it’s mostly accurate and insightful.

It’s also really good at helping you search for things that you can’t just type into a search box using keywords. Like, you can give it a general description of what you’re thinking about and it’ll guess. I’ve used it for TV shows from the 90-00s I largely forgot about, but also words, phrases, or concepts I can’t quite remember. One time I was trying to remember a famous experiment but gave it the wrong scientist and it correctly guessed who it was and what the experiment was about.

It’s also useful for brainstorming. You give it a general description of what you’re doing and it’ll give you somewhat generic recommendations of what you could expect other people to do so that you cover most bases. I’ve also used this for discussions where I’m not sure about my position so I’ll ask it to get a better idea about the problem and to give me other ideas about what I’m not considering.

Of course, these are all abstract descriptions, but if you want a more concrete example, let me know.

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RainfallSonata@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Not for you or I.

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KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Depends on what kind of AI. In gaming, AI is part of the process to entertain and challenge the player, and has even been used to help model life systems.

I have yet to see how useful LLMs can be outside of being blatant plagarists but for a time, projects like AI Dungeon really did push the emphasis on “interactive dynamic narratives” and it was really fun for a while.

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Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Lots of it’s actual AI. Nothing we have at the moment I would actually qualify as true AI. It’s just algorithms spitting out and answers what it interprets your question as. They don’t think or create anything, just regurgitate things in predefined patterns.

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Are there any genuine benefits to AI?

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Motor skills

Computer Vision

Managing Production

Togetherness