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.

Machine Learning for pattern recognition in very large datasets seems like good usage.

LLMs are just auto-complete with sycophantic tendencies.

If and when AGI comes, it’ll evolve from robotics, and won’t be the egregious energy suck that the current brute force approach.

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 mean, back in high school I knew someone who used machine learning to simulate basically the perfect game of monopoly, but otherwise, probably not any that I can think of.

I did hear of a game that eventually tried to replace the VA for the announcer with AI that used machine learning to basically make the enemies able to move around the environment better, but that’s also something not super useful AFAIK.

Otherwise, I have no clue since the closest I’ve seen to good use of it, if it is AI, would be the games that use proximity chat that create clones of you that will say things you have already said. Or you speak spell words/phrases and magic happens. Again, seems like more of a hobbyist thing since that kind of speech command thing is already a real thing and the game(s) implementation(s) isn’t/aren’t revolutionizing anything or making speech commands any better, AFAIK.

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.

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.

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

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

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

AI transcription might not be 100%, but it’s better than captioning long form shows myself or sending it to Rev.

I use a local instance of deepseek in the rare instance I need to have something written with a specific tone or style. I also tend to create a terrible work relationship for myself because I was a huge people pleaser and this has helped make my emails a bit more confident when necessary, especially when I have to advocate for myself. I am getting better at doing this on my own though.

There are countless constructive and legitimate uses for AI/LLMs. This just another form of automation, and it works well for many tasks already. Other people in the thread have already given a ton of examples, so I don’t really have to reiterate them here. Meanwhile, practically all the criticisms of this tech actually boil down to problems with how it’s applied under capitalism.

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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.

yup, it helps reducing wrist pain from typing

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.