I’ve seen a lot of sentiment around Lemmy that AI is “useless”. I think this tends to stem from the fact that AI has not delivered on, well, anything the capitalists that push it have promised it would. That is to say, it has failed to meaningfully replace workers with a less expensive solution - AI that actually attempts to replace people’s jobs are incredibly expensive (and environmentally irresponsible) and they simply lie and say it’s not. It’s subsidized by that sweet sweet VC capital so they can keep the lie up. And I say attempt because AI is truly horrible at actually replacing people. It’s going to make mistakes and while everybody’s been trying real hard to make it less wrong, it’s just never gonna be “smart” enough to not have a human reviewing its’ behavior. Then you’ve got AI being shoehorned into every little thing that really, REALLY doesn’t need it. I’d say that AI is useless.
But AIs have been very useful to me. For one thing, they’re much better at googling than I am. They save me time by summarizing articles to just give me the broad strokes, and I can decide whether I want to go into the details from there. They’re also good idea generators - I’ve used them in creative writing just to explore things like “how might this story go?” or “what are interesting ways to describe this?”. I never really use what comes out of them verbatim - whether image or text - but it’s a good way to explore and seeing things expressed in ways you never would’ve thought of (and also the juxtaposition of seeing it next to very obvious expressions) tends to push your mind into new directions.
Lastly, I don’t know if it’s just because there’s an abundance of Japanese language learning content online, but GPT 4o has been incredibly useful in learning Japanese. I can ask it things like “how would a native speaker express X?” And it would give me some good answers that even my Japanese teacher agreed with. It can also give some incredibly accurate breakdowns of grammar. I’ve tried with less popular languages like Filipino and it just isn’t the same, but as far as Japanese goes it’s like having a tutor on standby 24/7. In fact, that’s exactly how I’ve been using it - I have it grade my own translations and give feedback on what could’ve been said more naturally.
All this to say, AI when used as a tool, rather than a dystopic stand-in for a human, can be a very useful one. So, what are some use cases you guys have where AI actually is pretty useful?
I haven’t heard any other comments chime in from one of my use cases, so I’ll give it a stab. My first use case, I mentioned in another comment which is just adding a specific tone onto emails which I’m bad at doing myself. But my second use case is more controversial and I still don’t know how to feel about it. I’m a graphic designer and with most enhancements in design/art technology, if you don’t learn what’s new, you will fall behind and your usefulness will wane. I’ve always been very tech savvy and positive about most new tech so I like to stay up to speed both for my job and self interest. So how do I use AI for graphic design? The things I think have the best use case and are least controversial are the AI tools that help you edit photos. In the past, I have spent loads of time editing frizzy curly hair so I can cut out a person. As of a couple years ago, Adobe I touched some tools to make that process easier, and it worked ok but it wasn’t a massive time saver. Then they launched the AI assisted version and holy shit it works perfectly every time. Like give me the frizziest hair on a similar color background with texture and it will give you the perfect cutout in a minute tops. That’s the kind of shit I want for AI. More tools eliminate tedious processes!! However there is another more controversial use case which is generative AI. I’ve played with it a lot and the tools work fantastic and get you started with images you can splice together to make what you really envisioned or you can use it to do simple things like seamlessly remove objects or add in a background that didn’t exist. I once made a design with an illustrative style by inputting loads of images that fit the part, then vectorizing all the generated options and using pieces from those options to make what I really wanted. I was really proud of it especially since I’m not an illustrator and don’t have the skills to illustrate what I envisioned by hand. But that’s where things get controversial. I had to input the work of other people to achieve this. At the moment, I can’t use anything generative commercially even though Adobe is very nonchalant about it. My company has taken a firm stance on it which is nice, but it means I can really only use that aspect for fun even though it would be very useful in some situations.
TLDR: I use AI to give my writing style the right tone, to save loads of time editing photos, and to create images I don’t have the skills to create by hand (only for funzies).
In Premiere it’s great to generate captions. But I’m cautious since it:
In a sense, it’s the missing brick in their DRM wall that ties it all together. Not their content stocks, nor their cloud stuff felt that natural of an obstacle. And while it’s small now, I think they’d only make the difference between (allegedly) pirates and their always online customers bigger. Like, the next thing they’d gonna do is make healing brushes in every editor a server-only tool scrapping the pretty great local version they have now.
What sucks is if there was no commercial part here - i.e. like how you’re doing it just for fun, or if we lived in a magical world where we all just agreed that creative works were the shared output of humanity as a whole - then there would be no problem, we’d all be free to just use what we need to make new things however we want. But there is a commercial part to it, somebody is trying to gain using the collective work of others, and that makes it unethical.