Ask Lemmy

Work wise no impact so far but I use it to write any bullshit corpo speak emails , tidy up CVs and for things like game cheats etc. Its banned now in my job and we have to use copilot but I dont cause it will send everything back to the company so if I need it I just use chatgpt it on my personal one and email it to my work one.

Generally, GitHub Copilot helps me type faster. Though sometimes it predicts something I'm don't expect and I have to slow down and analyze it to see if it seems to know something I don't. A small percentage of these cases are actually useful but the rest is usually noise. It's generally useful as long as you don't blindly trust it.

I've had it improve grammar on some legal documents I had to submit and also generate a safety plan for a specific job I was working on. It did both of those things ok but I still had to edit and delete sections that weren't relevant

It's a neat tool for very specific language-related tasks.
For example, it can translate a poem so that the translation still rhymes.
Its main strength is not its ability to write, but to read. It's the first time in human history where you can pose any question to a computer in human language, and expect to get a meaningful reply.
As long as that question isn't asking for facts or knowledge.
It's also useful for "tip of my tongue" queries, where the right Google search term is exactly what you're missing.

All of its output is only usable and useful if you already know the facts about what you're asking, and can double-check for hallucinations yourself.

However, on a societal scale, it's a catastrophy on par with nuclear war.
It will consume arbitrary amounts of energy, right at the most crucial time when combatting climate change might still have been possible.
And it floods everyone's minds with disinfo, while we're at the edge of a global resurgance of fascism.

It gave me a starting point for a terms of reference document for a Green Champions group that I set up at work. That is the only beneficial thing that I can recall.

I have tried to find other uses, but so far nothing else has actually proven up to scratch. I expect that I could have spent more time composing and tweaking prompts and proofreading the output, but it takes as long as writing the damned documents myself.

For me?

Nothing, other than "I tried it with ChatGPT" before they bothered with Documentation.

Fuck anyone who skips documentation

I have only used it a few times, but it was amazing for my need. I work in IT so I'm not the best with writing. I enjoy working on projects and configuring new technology, servers, and applications for the company. What i don't enjoy is figuring out how to write communication emails to the company about what we're doing. So everytme I needed a write up informing people of what's happening and it's benefits, I used it to quickly write up something. Was it perfect? No, I had to edit some stuff of course. What it did do is create the entire structure and everything that needed to be said in the style of some corporate HR email. It would take me hours to type out something like this so for this to do it all in 2 minutes and me taking 5 minutes to look it over was amazing! Outside of this I haven't really used it much.

I'm a software person, llm tools for programming have been frankly remarkable. In my cleanest codebases copilot (using gpt4) autocompletes my intention correctly about 70% of the time today, reducing the amount of code I physically type by a huge margin. The accuracy shifts over time and it's dramatically less helpful for repositories that aren't pristine and full of well named functions and variables

Beyond that chatgpt has been a godsend sifting through the internet for the information I need, the new web feature is just outstanding since it actually gives sources

Chatgpt has also helped with writers block a ton, getting beyond plot points in my novel I was having a hard time with

It's been great with recipes, no more wading through fake life stories and ads

It's been helpful for complex questions about new topics I'm an amateur on, I've learned so much about neurology and the process of how neurons interact almost exclusively through the platform, fact checking takes a little time but so far it's been almost perfectly accurate on higher level objective questions

It's been helpful as a starting place for legal questions, the law is complex and having a starting place before consulting the lawyers has been really nice so I know what to ask

I could go on

The most impact it has is in my work life. I do design reviews and suddenly AI/ML projects became priorities and stuff has to be ready for the next customer showcase, which is tomorrow. One thing I remember from a conference I attended was an AI talk where the presenter said something along the lines of: If you think devs are bad with testing code in production, wait till you meet data scientists who want to test using live data.

Friends and I have had a good laugh writing rap battles or poems about strangely specific topics, but that's about it.

It's useful when you want to write some algorithm using specific versions of libraries. It first craps out wrong functions but after 1 or 2 redirects it usually shoots something that I then adapt to my use-case. I usually try googling it first but when most fucking guides use the new way of coding and I'm forced to use fixed versions due to company regulations, it gets frustrating to check if every function of known algorithms is available in the version I'm using and if it's not, which replacement would be appropriate.

It might hallucinate from time to time but it usually gives me good enough ideas/alternatives for me to be able to work around it.

I also use it to format emails and obscure hardware debugging. It's pretty bad but pretty bad is better than again, 99% of google results suggesting the same thing. GPT suggests you a different thing once you tell it you tried the first one.

As always, it's a tool and knowing that the answers aren't 100% accurate and you need to cross-check them is enough to make it useful.

A game changer in helping me find out more about topics that have wisdom buried in threads of forum posts. Great to figure out things I have only fuzzy ideas or vague keywords that might be inaccurate. Great at explaining things that I can follow up on questions about details. Great at finding equations I need but I do not trust it one bit to do the calculations for me. Latest gen also gives me sources on request so I can double check and learn more directly from the horse's mouth.

ChatGPT itself didn't do anything, FastGPT from Kagi helps me everyday though, for quickly summarizing sources to learn new things (eg. I search for a topic and then essentially just click the cited sources).

And ollama + open-webui + stable-diffusion-webui with a customized llama3.1-8b-uncensored is a great chat partner for very horny stuff.

I've used it to help me write batch scripts and excel formulas but found it pretty bad for LISP

It had a good impact for me, it saved me from an immense headache of university. I explicitly told the professors that, I have issues with grammar (despite it being my native language).

They kept freaking out about it and I eventually resorted to ChatGPT. Solved the issue immediately.

Only small use cases on my end: Professional - great at helping me save time on syntax related things (“help me right an excel formula that validates cell C2 as a properly formatted US phone number”). Personal - really helpful at fleshing out a comedy idea I’m toying with (“help me analyze and expand why the idea of ‘vampires benefitting from an app called Is There Garlic In This’ is funny for a stand-up routine”).

Otherwise, I spend just as much time verifying the LLM’s output as I would have just doing it myself.

I used it the other day to redact names from a spreadsheet. It got 90% of them, saving me about 90 minutes of work. It has helped clean up anomalies in databases (typos, inconsistencies in standardized data sets, capitalization errors, etc). It also helped me spruce up our RFP templates by adding definitions for standard terminology in our industry (which I revised where needed, but it helped to have a foundation to build from).

As mentioned in a different post, I use it for DND storylines, poems, silly work jokes and prompts to help make up bed time stories.

My wife uses it to help proofread her papers and make recommendations on how to improve them.

I use it more often now than google search. If it’s a topic important enough that I want to verify, then I’ll do a deeper dive into articles or Wikipedia, which is exactly what I did before AI.

So yea, it’s like the personal assistant that I otherwise didn't have.

For me, a huge impact.

I took an export of all our apps reviews and used it to summarise user pain points. Immediately a list of things we can prioritise.

When I'm doing repetitive code. It will (90% of the time) place the next puzzle piece in the repetition.

Using better systems like Cursor, I was able to create a twitch bot. I could then use it to make various text based games such as 20 questions or trivia. All (90% again, nothing is perfect) of which was done through prompts.

I genuinely appreciate being able to word my questions differently than old google, and specifying deeper into my doubts than just a key word search.

It’s great to delve into unknown topics with, then to research results and verify. I’ve been trying to get an intuitive understanding of cooking ingredients and their interaction with eachother and how that relates to the body, ayurvedically.

I think it’s a great way to self-educate, personally.

I’ve implemented two features at work using their api. Aside from some trial-and-error prompt “engineering” and extra safeguards around checking the output, it’s been similar to any other api. It’s good at solving the types of problems we use it for (categorization and converting plain text into a screen reader compliant (WCAG 2.1) document). Our ambitions were greater initially, but after many failures we’ve settled on these use cases and the C-Suite couldn’t be happier about the way it’s working.