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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • 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.





  • 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.




  • 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.