I don’t know about “art”, one part of ai image generation is of replacing stock images and erotic photos which frankly I don’t have a huge issue with as they’re both at least semi-exploitative industries anyway in many ways and you just need something that’s good enough.

Obviously these don’t extend to things a reasonable person would consider art, but business majors and tech bros rebranding something shitty to position it as a competitor to or in the same class as something it so obviously isn’t.

You’re bringing up edge cases for #1, and it should be replacing google translate and basic human translation, eg allowing people to understand posts online or communicate textually with people with whom they don’t share a common language. Using it for anything high stakes or legal documents is asking for trouble though.

For 2, it’s not for AIs finding issues, it’s for people wanting to book a flight, or seek compensation for a delayed flight, or find out what meals will be served on their flight. Some people prefer to use text or voice communication over a UI, and this makes it easier to provide.

For 3, grammar and spelling are different. I said it wasn’t useful for spellcheck, but even then if you give it the right context it may or may not catch it. I was referring more to word order and punctuation positioning.

For 4, yeah for me it’s on par in terms of results, but much much faster, especially when asking followup questions or specifying constraints. A lot of people aren’t search engine powerusers though, so will find it significantly easier, faster and better than conventional search than having to manage tabs or keep track of what you’ve seen without just scrolling back up in the conversation.

For 5, recipes have been in the gutter for a decade or more now, SEO came before LLMs, but yeah, you’ve actually caught on to an obvious #6 I missed here of text summarisation…

What I’m getting overall though is that you’re not considering how tech-savvy the average person is, which absolutely makes them seem less useful as the more tech savvy you are, both the more you’re aware of their weaknesses and the less you benefit from the speedup by simplification they bring. This does make ai’s shortcomings more dangerous, but as it matures one would hope that it becomes common knowledge.

Who said you were scary?

Frankly I pity you more than anything.

And no matter what I picked, you’d reject them because you’re not actually considering them, you’re just either a troll, a contrarian or a luddite.

Nice, here’s a gold star for finding one case of it doing something wrong. I’ll call the CEO of AI and tell them to call it off, it’s a good thing humans have never said anything like that!

I’m going to limit to LLMs as that’s the generally accepted term and there’s so many uses for AI in other fields that it’d be unfair.

1. Translation. LLMs are pretty much perfect for this.

2. Triaging issues for support. They’re useless for coming to solutions but as good as humans without the need to wait at sending people to the correct department to deal with their issues.

3. Finding and fixing issues with grammar. Spelling is something that can be caught by spell-checkers, but grammar is more context-aware, another thing that LLMs are pretty much designed for, and useful for people writing in a second language.

4. Finding starting points to research deeper. LLMs have a lot of data about a lot of things, so can be very useful for getting surface level information eg. about areas in a city you’re visiting, explaining concepts in simple terms etc.

5. Recipes. LLMs are great at saying what sounds right, so for cooking (not so much baking, but it may work) they’re great at spitting out recipes, including substitutions if needed, that go together without needing to read through how someone’s grandmother used to do xyz unrelated nonsense.

There’s a bunch more, but these were the first five that sprung to mind.

it’s more that the only way to get some anti AI crusader that there are some uses for it is to put it in an analogy that they have to actually process rather than spitting out an “ai bad” kneejerk.

I’m probably far more anti AI than average, for 95% of what it’s pushed for it’s completely useless, but that still leaves 5% that it’s genuinely useful for that some people refuse to accept.

Except you’re expecting it to do everything. Your car is too “technically advanced” to walk on the sidewalk, but wait, you can do that anyway and don’t need to reinvent your legs

A six year old can read and write Arabic, Chinese, Ge’ez, etc. and yet most people with PhD level experience probably can’t, and it’s probably useless to them. LLMs can do this also. You can count the number of letters in a word, but so can a program written in a few hundred bytes of assembly. It’s completely pointless to make LLMs to do that, as it’d just make them way less efficient than they need to be while adding nothing useful.

If you want to know how computers work, do electrical engineering. If you want to know how electricity works, do physics. If you want to know how physics works, do mathematics. If you want to know how mathematics works, too bad, best you can do is think about the fact it works in philosophy.

And yet the type of woodland in Deadpool & Wolverine appears almost exclusively in Europe, and so (given how much they’d have to go out of their way to find somewhere like that elsewhere), must be European.

If anything I’m generalising that all North American woodland is either primeval or modern plantations, but nowhere have I said that there isn’t woodland like that in Europe.

They know exactly what they’re talking about, and especially how they’re talking about it.

It’s all considered to make it look like both the local and national politicians are doing a great job and you should vote for them. Whatever the medium for that happens to be isn’t really important.

Yeah there is, it’s in the growth patterns where you can tell the trees were either planted or allowed to grow in an arrangment that maximised yield, are all very similar in age, and historically but not recently regularly trimmed for wood and sticks without chopping them down.

Asia and Africa (other than Japan, which did it with evergreen trees) historically used other materials (mainly grasses/palms), and in the Americas they used different construction methods both pre- and post-colonisation, so you don’t get (as many) old managed woodlands.

Interesting video on the topic

Watch Deadpool vs Wolverine. The entire woods scene was so clearly filmed in a European woodland, it ruins the whole film.

With China, UK and afaik US (at least some states) attitude to regulation, a VPN is turning more into a necessity to browse the open internet rather than a tool for people who value privacy though

I’ve been trying to plan a hiking trip and the number of sites, even those without any nsfw or user generated content, that just geoblock the UK because it’s not worth dealing with their government’s shit is impressive

Sure, Monero is good for privacy-focused applications, but it’s a fraction of the market and the larger coins aren’t particularly any less tracable than virtual temporary payment cards, so Monero (and other privacy-centric coins) get overshadowed by the garbage coins.

Same with AI, where non-LLM models are having a huge impact in medicine, chemistry, space exploration and more, but because tech bros are shouting about the objectively less useful ones, it brings down the reputation of the entire industry.

JavaScript is like C, you can learn close to the entire (useful) featureset in under an hour, but for some reason people like to say it’s complicated or hard to learn (dates notwithstanding because the way dates work in JS is stupid)

At least LLMs produce something, even if it’s slop, all crypto does is… What does crypto even do again?

I work in advertising, I know, it’s just that in the industry it’s pretty well known that Google, Facebook etc. hugely overinflate their numbers as they arbitrarily decide that it definitely did have an effect on you to make their systems look better

The problem is the ones with all the data have no real use for it.

Google, Facebook, etc. tell you they have data, sell you the ad, run the ad on their own site, then tell you how well the ad did, but not in absolute terms. All in a black box. They don’t actually have to use their data, as they’re the ones grading their own work, they can just flaunt it to get buyers onboard.