Honestly it’s trickier than most think.
There are plenty of theoretical use cases, sure, especially for AI because it’s basically just either statistics on very large datasets or heuristics. Most of us, if not all of us, use that pretty much daily.
LLM though is a lot of less obvious but one can easily imagine public research on language, namely being able to study how language evolved.
GenAI… also, in itself honestly it might even be the most interesting of all because it’s makes us pragmatically ask what it’s like to be creative.
Yet… all that is so SO different from the commercialization and the capture of it.
So public research in AI, I’m 100% behind it. It can be useful. VC backed for-profit systems that extract and capture value, no, nearly nothing legitimate can come out of this… but to be fair it’s not limited to AI, AI just happens to be the last thing they try to capture.
I’d use the term Machine Learning to avoid the baggage of what AI implies/promises. But ML has tons of real world applications that other tech can’t solve. I view it as the best tool for fuzzy or approximate data. It’s used in statistical modeling, which can be applied to the automated generation of potential new drugs or proteins. ML can be used in image processing, with image recognition being a huge use case, as well as real-time upscaling like DLSS. And it can be great for Speech-to-Text, natural language processing is a difficult problem to solve but ML approaches do it fairly consistently. These are applications that can generally tolerate the sizable margin of error that a statistical model inherently possesses, either by not being mission critical or by being designed to get reviewed by human experts; I don’t think ML should ever be applied to areas which need guaranteed precision or accuracy. Also note that of all of these examples, only one uses an LLM, and none vie for the title of “AGI” or claim consciousness or intelligence lol. So that’s why I avoid the term AI. ML can imply some of the same stuff but it hasn’t been buzzwordified the same way
Yeh, AI is used in/for language revitalisation and preservation projects, machine translation, live captioning, speech synthesis, medicine, wildlife preservation, disaster detection, weather forecasting and more
Depends what you mean by AI and by legitimate.
So far it seems to be super useful for the following topics:
- customer support (super annoying if you cannot directly forward to a human)
- programming (especially web development; only as a tool)
- finding rhymes
- writing checkers (only as a tool)
- (log) anomaly detection
- computer vision
If you consider moral in “legitimate”, you might dislike programming, customer support and writing checkers as these replace jobs. However, I strongly believe in AI tax and redistributing that money towards everyone especially affected jobs (artists, …). I feel like artificially limiting the applicability will just be a loss to the global market unless something similar is achieved by figuring out the copyright issues.
was there at any time , say in the last 50 or so years, at any point, new tech that we, the tech enthusiasts, folks who go out of their way to buy and use and find new uses for tech, tech that we somehow missed to see its usefulness? anything that needed this much debating and convincing and hand-wrangling and moral bargaining? and having those fucking cretins on the other side of the argument?
did someone need to convince you the web is awesome? mobile phone? electric car? conversely, you instantly knew VR is bullshit. and crypto. and all its derivatives.
this shit ain’t what they say it is, there ain’t no I in this ai. you perpetuating this butlerian bullshit means you swallowed their spiel (look up critihyping), that this financial scam dressed up as progress is an inevitability.
this just needs a normal revolution, of the kind that was enacted a coupla times in history, stripping the right folks of a buncha stuff that I ain’t gonna specify here, for entirely legal reasons.
I was never excited by VR because I’m in the 10-20% of the population that uses some of the visual cues for depth that VR doesn’t mimic and so gets motion sick.
I was excited by AR. The technology is almost good enough to be useful. It’s currently at the stage smartphones were when I owned a Nokia N80: not actually useful, but you can see the potential. But, for it to actually be useful, it needs to be designed with private as the number one requirement and that’s not something I’d trust big tech to do, so I don’t see the interesting use cases appearing any time soon.
Machines that confidently generate wrong answers? I’ve dealt with enough humans like that to not want to see it automated.
@yuman @zdhzm2pgp I was a mobile phone refusenik for a long while, and I still barely use the thing, for anything. But apparently that was just me.
The scale of the rejection of AI right now is a whole different thing, though.
There are plenty, as others have said, it has been able to help a lot in science. It has been used for finding new drugs, search for composite materials.
Sadly i don’t think the pros will outweigh the cons, the society as is right now won’t let it happen. I truly think this tool, even without any fancy AGI, if used in a responsible manner could help us solve some of the most pressing problems the world has.
But it won’t happen, look at the irresponsible manner the capitalist society has rolled out this tech, which is still in its infancy. It has wasted tons and tons of energy on models that are not yet fully mature. Brute force training of shit models just to get the best monthly benchmark over competitors. It’s so sad to see all the promised goals in terms of saving energy and water that went to garbage the moment the AI hype exploded.
And what we got for that? A bunch of models causing problems because they are not ready. Executives cutting workforce, in part to justify the use the new shiny tooling, only to get shittier services. And worse of all, shortage of water and energy to pump more compute.
Even if we get to a future where AI is cheap, powerful and capable, it will only be used to widen the gap between the wealthy and the common people.
Stephen Hawking said it way more eloquently already in 2016
The potential benefits of creating intelligence are huge. […]. Perhaps with the tools of this new technological revolution, we will be able to undo some of the damage done to the natural world by the last one — industrialization. And surely we will aim to finally eradicate disease and poverty. […] In short, success in creating AI, could be the biggest event in the history of our civilization.
But it could also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks. Alongside the benefits, AI will also bring dangers, like powerful autonomous weapons, or new ways for the few to oppress the many. It will bring great disruption to our economy.
Sorry for the doomer rant, its a conflicted topic for me, feel free to skip.
Sure, there are good uses.
I use the RADE V1 codec in FreeDV. It is an AI vocoder that packs high quality audio into 1500 Hz of bandwidth. It sounds much better than traditional codecs like AMBE or Codec 2.
Another one I use is AI motion detection for my security cameras. It recognises a vehicle or a person and significantly reduces the number of false alerts.
My Reolink cameras have pretty good AI detection, I think that is a decent use of AI if it runs locally. I like seeing the “Animal” detections from my doorbell camera, it’s usually a cat or a rabbit investigating the front steps.
Mine runs locally on the DVR. I wouldn’t trust any cloud service with my video.
My old setup only had normal motion detection. I couldn’t enable alerts with that because it would go off all night from the bugs swarming the IR LEDs on the cameras.
UniFi?
It’s a Dahua DVR with analog cameras. I have my firewall set so the DVR can only access the push notification server and my SMTP server.
Seems like the perfect technology to create a browser extension that re-writes article headlines to be non-clickbait and actually reflect the content of an article. Bonus points if it could redo youtube titles and thumbnails.
I wouldn’t want an LLM to rewrite anything im reading, that sounds like a recipe to have information presented to me in a different way than intended, or out right manipulated through a prompt.
Check out dearrow: https://dearrow.ajay.app/
Is this really useful when LLMs will fabricate court cases out of thin air?
Yes, they tend to be pretty good at pattern recognition, which has enormously useful applications in manufacturing, data sorting, translation, and more. There are absolutely use cases for AI/LLMs. The problem is that, under capitalism, LLMs are being overhyped as a new market for finance capital to saturate (creating a bubble), and that these huge, inefficient data centers are being pushed as ultimate investment vehicles at the immense destruction of the environment. In a socialist economy, with strong guardrails on the development of LLMs, these can be made to help society in general. See how it’s treated in China vs. the US Empire.
AI/LLMs are not a panacea, despite what investors will try to tell you. At the same time, they are not utterly worthless. They have definite use cases that will be found gradually.
Tons. I think if people read my opinions on AI they likely see me as a luddite.
My concerns are not about whether it’s useful. It’s that if the 1% use it to replace most actual workers, the lack of input will make future models actually worse than current ones, and at the very least would stifle innovation.
I’m very concerned about models built on the IP (voluntarily given or not) of people, being used to replace those same people.
I’m very concerned with where we go as a society if we do go down the route of losing so many jobs.
I’m concerned about the race to get the best model, using so much energy and natural resources.
But do I think AI is and can be a very powerful tool, to enhance productivity? Without a doubt it can.
LLM as a glorified search engine seems kind of ok. It’s the generative side that is awful. And the search engine aspect might do harm than good, since it’s also used for mass surveillance.
Machine translation is now working fairly well, maybe just in time. Within a decade or so, most technical and scientific publications will probably be in Chinese. So the translation tools will help us backwards English speakers read them.
AI has a use case, but after trying to use LLMs for generative content like creative writing or storytelling, I think it more of a word salad. Unless you are one of those pros thay can generate content that looks human, no idea how they do it.
https://aibooru.online/posts/96423
Of course there are many legitimate and/or constructive uses for AI. Like any new technology, it depends on what you do with it. You can use it do help or harm, that is up to us.
For example, in many countries getting a radiologist to look at medical scans takes a lot of time and is a huge bottleneck. AI can help accelerate this.
It’s a tool. As engineer, I will try to use each and every tool that helps me, so it’s reasonable for me to learn using this tool effectively as well: what works, what doesn’t, what’s expensive, how can I keep it under control etc.
Of course thats only the purely technical/utilitarian aspect, and I’m not going into the moral/social aspects here.
Personally, I decided using a local LLM was acceptable for generating translation strings in my open source application. It had already been manually translated into a bunch of different languages by various contributors over the years, but I just did a major UI rework and so most of the existing translations now had a ton of missing entries. Qt6’s translation tool had an AI Translation function so I decided to try it out after setting up ollama and the recommended qwen3 model. It did a pretty decent job as far as I can tell, I am only fluent in English but I did some cross checking by translating back to English via Google Translate and it seemed to do a decent job. It at least got all the strings translated to something usable, once it’s merged then I expect native speakers will contribute cleanups and rewordings if needed.
I don’t really consider translation purely generative as it is more of a conversion task. I think AI is pretty useful for this. Same for things like automatic captioning and even mundane text to speech (if not being used to replace voice acting).
