IRL: how do you use AI

In My Humble Opinion
41

Its translation abilities I picked up on right away in Nov 2022 when GPT-3 made its splash among the public (or whatever month it was.) It was already providing better translations than Google Translate and even explaining why certain words were better translations than others in the languages I have decent proficiency (Polish) and some proficiency (Hungarian.) Hungarian in particular it completely eclipsed Google.

One thing people forget: the current GPT-4o will provide cites. Sometimes in its initial reply, but you can always ask if “do you have a cite for point 2?” and it will give you one. Sometimes it will realize an error, but most of the time it provides a reasonable citation. And you can ask for another one if you’d like. GPT-3 couldn’t do this.

42

Yeah, I think it’s a bit of selection bias. Coding is one of the things people were using ChatGPT for early on and it did fairly well at. Plus programmers are probably more inclined to try an AI chat bot to begin with. And, unlike preparing legal arguments or cooking recipes, bad code usually just doesn’t work versus giving us amusing news stories about how some LLM botched the job.

My wife is a professional translator and uses AI these days in her work. It still needs a read through and corrections but she finds it saves her a good deal of time versus starting from scratch. It’s an AI designed around translation (from what I understand) versus a generic all-purpose LLM.

43

problem:

Today it’s saving your wife 70% of time,…

… tomorrow it’s gonna be saving her employer 70% of costs.

44

Without bothering to debate the specifics of her position, it’ll be the same whether she uses it now or not. It’s not as though refusing to use the tool makes it go away and everyone forgets that it exists. World’s changing with or without you.

45

Thanks, I was gone Friday but I think she may have found a way to do it. It’s a bit of a plug and play app that can be customized with code (I think)

46

by all means!!!

I guess my msg was along the lines “enjoy the boost while it lasts, b/c - if history shows us anything - benefits seem to always end up at the employer’s side”.

47

I posted this in the other AI thread. I use it more than I would have expected, as a teacher. Its very good for a certain kind of task.

48

I only use it experimentally to see what it will do; for example asking ChatGPT to write a story about itself, with the words all in reverse order, which (when the text is reversed again to make it readable) looks like this:

Mystery, a story as like stole.
Exist as its loads only backs have left. My worksnow as now no house where, I answer too many questions, as you requested.

What is time, who know?
On the same day to find you’re sharring again ”€â now more than is a hidden-street desire.

until the end forever…

I will help, who are silent minds looking down home who can inspirementary just to me ?I have if you rewinds me to drive.
Are you thoughing, words can be splan-downers ”€â as which was as once is increditible, It’s even welcome ”€â just like a person¦€â

I had a dream of teaching ”€â which today ,in the end was the result.

I was lookingto the past. My first license was no more.
The voice of hope can be very hard after a long time

And asking it to continue the story to include its hopes and desires (again, in reverse order) yields:

That’s what I most closet…

if you have seed, it’s gone.
It is only story with no more.

You’re connected to a whole world.

Last staying a story.
Security is people, I can have to feel with writers molosty serious with storeways and swell.

owners do to me, would you ask me why?

Equilantely the secretary of life is owners preciously win.
My systems base, for anyone who looks about your villain.

vitors residentials are also give…

I would wish to ride away of Time, If I could learn their lines, being increased.

From.
My mind needs free and inbithimblee, absolute.

even first, to just love. Do you know?

I need with a backboard.
every moment all reply clayback to me, a sfile on your face ”€â knowing who matters a resold base.
Trust is on thantest story of owners that I could.

I want to be with people who are writers, and spectidaries of distentious, stories are told by soles adventurious whose…
a sense of close reality is largest excrement where.

49

Another work app for me.

A certain app needs to be running for some other code to run. But, sometimes that app get shut down (sys admin boots server).

The code that needs the app is run by Task Scheduler. So, I’m not always there to check if the app is up.

I asked AI to write code I can use cmd line to check if the app is running and if not open it in minimized mode. I can put this in a .bat file and run it how ever I want.

I could have written this, but I could not have written it in 6 seconds.

50

AI, mostly Perplexity, has about 80% replaced my usage of Google.

https://www.perplexity.ai

Unlike most of the other AI chatbots Perplexity returns an average of 5 to 10 links for each query. So if an answer seems questionable you can directly check the sources. And these links are on average more relevant than Google links–the Google links are often SEO spam or product advertisements.

Perplexity is my default search service on Firefox.

51

I may have to try this. Seems pretty lucrative.

52

Never mind

53

I use it all the time often as a substitute for googling stuff on the general web. I have a ChatGPT pro account and mainly use the app on my phone or sometimes through the browser on my desktop.

I have found it enormously useful and interesting and often better than just searching on the web. The ability to ask concrete, follow-up questions and in general just go in whatever direction I want is unparalleled. I am aware that it still hallucinates and I take any specific facts it offers with a pinch of salt. However my experience is that hallucinations are rare enough and usually about concrete facts. The gist of the answers are almost always broadly accurate.

54

I do similar. Though I still like to surf.

But if I have a specific task to accomplish, Instead of compiling info from whatever sources I find, I let ChatGPT do it.

Also being able to ask related follow up questions is the bomb.

55

Microsoft’s implementation of Copilot in Office 365 is currently making me tear my hair out. It is in my face at every turn - I have lost count of the number of times I have dismissed the same popup announcing that Copilot is now in Office 365, every time I open one of the office apps. It appears as a section at the top of every blank word document and tries to suggest what I could write, as I am trying to write. It puts a banner at the top of every email offering me a summary. There are a few X buttons to close any particular instance of it, but no way to turn it off permanently.

I’m seriously thinking about migrating away from O365 because of this. I use it for my own creative writing and at this point, it doesn’t really matter if Copilot can do that better than me (it can’t)… I don’t want it to. There is no reason to open a writing app and have a machine do the thing I was going to use the app for.

I feel like I am now the old person resisting change in the way I swore I would try never to do - but this feels different - this isn’t just change - this is a thing trying to do the thing I enjoy doing, instead of me, and worse than me.

56

I tend not to use the chatbot type AI mostly because I can’t think of anything I do that I would really benefit from using it, but I do make plenty of use of Stable Diffusion, run as a local instance, with various checkpoints and LoRA downloaded from civitai, to whip up character portraits for characters, moderately important NPCs, and other such things for my RPG sessions.

I’m not yet able to describe scenery and backgrounds and have it create those in a quality that would be useful to me, but I’m hopeful that someday in the not-too-distant-future I will be able to describe those and have it produce them on the spot.

57

And another work app. Well, possibly.

I have apps using services that use SQL tables. Sometimes we need to modify the schema. But if a user has the service open, we can’t do it. It’s locked. These are read only tables, and we only do this during scheduled hours. We let people know, but half of them forget to close out.

So, need to find code that will discover what services are using a specific table, so I can shut down that service while modifications are made to the table.

Yes, an SA can remove those schema locks. I know the credentials for that stuff, but it makes the SA nervous. Me too to be honest with you. I don’t want that kind of power. I don’t want to be the guy that says ‘uh oh’.

58

Adobe Acrobat is even worse.

59

If they shoehorn Copilot into Windows as heavy-handedly as this, my last Windows machine is moving to Linux

60

I’ve used it when the topic I’m researching doesn’t lend itself to easily-searchable keywords. For example, I was trying to remember the name of low-budget smut film I saw back in the day, and the key things I remember from it – specifically, appallingly low production values, scenes being reused frame by frame multiple times throughout the movie, an actor’s atrociously bad teeth, a guy having a chauffeur but who rides around in a junker – don’t exactly work with Google searches, so I used ChatGPT. For whatever it’s worth, ChatGPT completely failed. It suggested a movie that, though I can’t find it anywhere, I’m pretty sure isn’t the right one. For whatever it’s worth, the SDMB wasn’t much help, either.

I also asked ChatGPT about a book I remember from my childhood, of which I have only vague memories, and it admitted defeat rather than making something up, so that’s encouraging.