It’s not intelligence and it is a passing fad. I could be wrong though. The only thing I can think of is a car assembly line that has robots and people. You could get rid of the people, thus freeing up their time for a better quality of life.

In computational biology / biotechnology, LLMs are being trained on biological sequences and can then be used to generate new genes or genetic variants. These genes can be placed into bacteria who are then fed with e.g. sugar to make them produce various valuable molecules from renewable resources instead of from crude oil using conventional chemistry. There is also work on enabling plastic biodegradation this way.

Anything that’s fuzzy and impossible to automate with traditional algorithms, but that also has a reasonably high tolerance for error. It just makes up stuff a good portion of the time, you see.

However, I’ve found some benefits with AI. For example, I’m chatting with ChatGPT on credit cards, because it is something I may lean towards getting into. It’s helping me better understand than most people have tried explaining to me. Simply because it is giving me a more stream-lined response than people just beating the bush.

Watch out, personal finance is not one of those things.

It’s very helpful for neurodivergent people - helps you figure out who you are and what you want, how you think, learn and work best, identify your obstacles and help you overcome them, understand your neurodivergency and compare it to how neurotypical people think. It’s fantastic at generating ideas that you then test out. The ideas that it gives you are based on how you actually function, so often times they’re valid.

I went to my local neighborhood association because I wanted to improve where I live. I was elected president of the association a couple months later, mostly because no one else wanted to do it. It’s a fairly poor part of a medium sized city in the U.S.

I’ve been using AI (running locally on a computer I built that isn’t connected to the internet, to reduce harm to the environment) to apply for grants, plan events and help me run the meetings.

It is actually perfect for the job. Saying that as someone who thinks AI is mostly hype and useless for the majority of its current common uses these days. I feed it the text from city grant applications or ask it to make a poster to increase attendance and it’s saved me a lot of time. Without it, being someone diagnosed ADHD, I would not have been able to do most of the stuff I have accomplished so far.

I had a project of markdown files. About 400 of them, with about 1200 plus links in them.

The original filenames were changed. The links no longer worked.

The LLM went through each link, and found the new one, based on filename and file content, using its ability to recognise patterns, words, etc etc.

Absolutely saved me maybe a couple of days of manual pain labour, and all done in about 10 minutes.

This is the kind of thing I use it for. Horrible repetitive processes.

If we’re strictly talking about LLMs: Certain accessibility services - MAYBE. Writing closed captions / transcription for the most part requires little “human” touch. If we ASSUME that AI will be able to it reliably one day - because it really can’t yet - that’s one thing that would benefit society.

Image descriptions is another thing I might see done by AI one day but that still requires an understanding of what’s actually important about the image.

AI has uses in the medical, scientific, and disabled communities. I’ve seen it helping blind people with shopping, with Google glasses or whatever reporting what they’ve picked up and describing it to them. It can also identify/predict cancer tissue early.

Generative AI is peak laziness and the death of human creativity. Using AI for companionship has a nasty effect on mental health.

AI should have only ever been an assistant in medical/scientific research in my opinion, simply because it’s so damaging to the environment, economy, and society.

Reading TOS and clicking off all the privacy options on the cookie popup

You need to differentiate between generative AI, NLP, machine learning, etc. Your question is pretty much entirely pointless otherwise.

Writing and fact checking ONLY the most basic concepts and common information that is found multiple times and in multiple places online (eg. It’s strongly reenforced and verified in the training data and has/will be the same for a long time).

Mass formatting, changing formats, changing language, and decoding via common methods.

Pitching “what you mean, but can’t remember the name for”.

…and that’s about it.

Finding info in a large quantity of information.

Not a hot dog

And if ChatGPT made a mistake? How would you know before it’s to late ?

It’s ok for very furnace level exploration. Like 100 level stuff. If it’s something you’d google and easily find in an article it’s likely to do a ok job.

I’ve also found it’s good for tedious straightforward tasks. Anything that would be uncomfortable or timely or automate manually. Best for one offs.

I’ve also found it’s extremly good for translation, which was it’s originally use.