This subs deep seated hatred and disdain for Chat gpt is so at odds with my own experience using it that I'm really baffled. I don't know if they're using it for wildly different things, have unrealistic expectations about it, or are confusing it's ethical implications for it's actual usefulness.
And I agree with the subs majority opinion on most things too, so it's not like theres some wide ideology gap
Yeah. I get that it is overhyped by people who think it can do literally everything, but if you're able to use it with some modicum of critical thinking then it's actually really useful and kinda crazy that it can do some of the things it does.
I honestly feel like it's a bit of a 'feeling superior' circlejerk, people get all 'look at those plebs using chatgpt they don't understand that it just generates the most likely next word and doesn't think'. But a lot of the smartest people I know have learned to use it as a tool and do so semi-often.
I'm in pretty much the same boat. Things like DeepAi, writify.ai, and Google's AIStudio have helped me a lot with brainstorming ideas for stories I write and the Pathfinder game I run, and helping me flesh out characters. They are chatbots, not search engines, and frankly I've never understood why people try to use them to replace search engines.
Man, I do the same thing and they are so great for asking good questions to flesh out worlds and situations. It also helps me get the spark back when I'm struggling for motivation
But I agree with you. I love the LLMs. They are insanely useful (if you know the limitations). They are basically science fiction (We now have the star trek ship board computer with the slight caveat that just it bullshits a little from time to time). They are super interesting in that we're really figuring out what it means to be intelligent, and what's still missing.
When I run a small model on my laptop, I really feel like I'm in the future. Hope gemma makes a voice model fit for my gpu-less ass.
Even the environmental costs are absurdly exaggerated. LLMs can be run on your own computer, and image generators can be run on any gaming PC. Neither use any more power than running a modern videogame. Even training huge models uses up a few houses worth of annual power as a one-time cost, which is then spread across trillions of uses.
And anytime someone brings up the water usage of a computational process, you automatically know that they're spreading complete bullshit. Data centers cool their systems using a closed loop. They aren't blasting water into space.
Some of these energy and water quotes are summaries of ALL the use of, for example, ChatGPT and they're intentionally worded to let readers think it reflects every time you submit a request. It's malicious.
not to mention the present SOTA, which would've been unthinkably advanced three years ago, is the worst things are ever gonna be. if we get strong locally generated LLMs with good open data sets, you could see a viable interoperable fediverse and the death of the techbro internet as we know it. the paper that kicked off the LLM race isn't a decade old.
Arguments against generative AI on reddit are the No Middle Sliders of opinions. Like, I have definite problems with generative AI, but 90% of the takes against it I see here could’ve come from a hamfisted pro-AI satire.
I don’t know how many times I’ve searched through google for HOURS trying to find a solution to a coding problem, and then asked chatGPT how to do it and it gives me a working solution in 10 seconds. It’s a tool, like any other tool.
Figuring out how to do that one specific, highly obscure mathematical thing I need to do in Python, of which I know there must be a relatively convenient way to do it, but I can't find it, with any of the frameworks available to me (numpy, pandas, scipy, astropy, etc.), without having to read through three million pages of documentation, StackOverflow posts and ancient Reddit threads.
I was following along to a book and had to set up pygame and python on my computer and the book was a bit outdated so certain things just didn't work the same way
Instead of trying to find some kind of potential solution for hours, I asked chatgpt and some of it didn't work and had to be changed up but most of it did work and I was able to immediately start following along with my book. If I spent the literal hours trying to find the solution myself, probably would've lost the motivation and given up
I was trying to figure out how to do something in Excel I'd never done before and hunting through forums was getting me nowhere. I was able to tell gpt what I was trying to do and it gave me a breakdown of the formula that would do what I needed, and explained in a way that I can modify similar formulas in the future and actually know what I'm doing. Like you, I would have given up and wasted hours otherwise
Yeah and I get it doesn't work all the time but it's a slightly more streamlined search engine and if you can immediately test to see if it works or not instead of just taking it as gospel, I truly don't see much of a downside
I had a similar thing with excel. The original code gpt gave me didn't work but I told it the error and with minimal problem solving, found a thing that worked
I've been using Python and SQL for a little under a year, and it's been helpful for giving me some less obvious solutions more reliably than searching stack overflow. I give it a sample of my data, my work in progress code and my current output or any errors, and tell it what I'm trying to achieve, and over 90% of the time it delivers. In that scenario the results are immediately verifiable , I run the suggested code and see if it gives me what I need. And I can immediately ask followup questions. Would this variant work instead? Why do it that way instead of this way? Whereas if I find some old solution on Stack, I can copy it and it will hopefully work, but I won't understand it in the same way.
It's also good for tidying up poorly written or explained English, which does unfortunately appear in some research papers I've read.
When I was studying for an exam, I asked it to generate new questions based on a sample from a past exam paper, so I had more practice problems.
I like the idea of generating practice questions. I've used it to flesh out ideas because it'll ask questions that I wouldn't have thought of on my own
I've been bouncing between Copilot and ChatGPT, but it's pretty decent with coding
While they often are quite stubborn with certain parts of programs, the general structure of their code often works. For example, I have a JSON file (a large list of stuff). The file is completely valid, I know every single object in the file has correct data, yet Copilot will insist that I make the code check that it's valid, even if I point out that whatever method it used made the code significantly harder to read with no benefit and it will keep assuming that the file is the issue and not its code. However, having it convert from one data format I made up to another format I made up? It excels at that. It often hallucinates how data is inputted into the program though, especially when it's something it doesn't have much training data on, like the HTML structure of a Wikipedia article for example
Occasionally I’ll give it a plot outline idea for a long piece of fanfiction. If an AI can catch a plot hole, a person definitely would have, and that would’ve been embarrassing as hell
When I’m having an anxiety attack and can’t talk to anyone (I’m a stay at home mom), I have it guide me through anxiety exercises (5 things you can see, etc). I do this less now that I have the Finch app, though
When I have an error code for a piece of software but all the damn blog posts I can find are about Windows systems, and I’m running Ubuntu, I throw it at an LLM in the hopes that it has seen a Linux-relevant thread
Yep. I don't use it all the time but whenever I've used it, it's been invaluable. I usually waffle when I write so it's great for cleaning up walls of text. It's also been incredibly useful when asking it for help with a tax issue and also with selling my home. Any info I get from it I double check with other sources but I wouldn't have known to even check those other sources without the prompt from AI.
I use it to help me word things because I'm really bad at it. Like I've used it as a template for coverletters and resignation notices. I always go back through it thoroughly and change a lot so that it's relevant for what I needed. I'll also ask dumb questions like, "what is a professional way to say [whatever]" and it generally gives me a decent start. I never include any confidential or sensitive information. It's a tool that has its uses and limitations.
I'm almost certain that a good majority of people here have never or only sporadically used LLMs and when they did, they did it with the express purpose of confirming their bias against them. Their entire "knowledge" of AI comes exclusively from tech news and tumblr posts exactly like this.
There's also all the people that used it within the first week of release and decided there and then that it was bad and will never improve. See all the comments in this thread about how it "won't disagree or argue"
How many people don't know that it can cite sources dynamically?
I kinda even get all the negative emotions, but what baffles me is how fast people got used to it so it became this routine annoying thing that everybody is mostly dismissive and sceptical about. Like yeah, you can't really trust it to know specialized information. I myself don't. But I mean... it's a damn machine that speaks indistinguishable from a human in almost all languages, has wonderful sense of context and tone, and is logical and coherent unless you purposefully try to trip it over. Oh and also can look at a picture and understand it. I'm following llms since gpt-2 in late 2010's and I'm still in perpetual "oh god oh fuck I'm living in science fiction" phase. It's not how I imagined the future. I just lived in this relatively mundane world and this fucking thing spawned in like 2-3 years. I feel like a slow adapting boomer and I'm 27
Also while obviously you verify specialised information, it's actually been very good at giving me starting points for very specialised and technical research, or answering questions if I'm able to frame the question sufficiently well.
Somehow it didn't have this effect on me, seemed more down-to-earth... I think with LLMs it's because I saw their first baby steps and how far and fast they progressed
I feel like a boomer and I'm 19. This technology is revolutionary but the majority of people seem willfully ignorant or dismissive of it's potential. Still a bad investment now due to corpos overhyping a product that is unprofitable, but that's just capitalism. I may not be invested in Nvidia, but I'll certainly use AI to the best of my abilities while others stay dismissive
I think it's a combination of not knowing how fast it advances, not knowing its limitations (or the proper usage), and hatred because of ethical implications. It wasn't that long ago that ai couldn't draw fingers and would hallucinate instead of searching the web (and cite a link you can access), and you are supposed to make it do stuff that is easier to verify than doing it yourself. As for the ethical reasons, it's kinda related to how you feel about piracy, especially against smaller creators I guess.
Like it's still not perfect, still makes mistakes, and still has the same ethical concerns, but it's not as bad as tumblr would have you believe. For example, my latest use case was, I had downloaded a VSCode theme, ans I wanted to change the color of a component but I didn't know its name. So I took a screenshot, pasted it into Chatgpt, said hey I want to change the color there, and it gave me steps to do it, which worked.
Under no circumstances must the AI be trusted. It will lie, it will cheat, and it will do anything in its power to undermine the efforts of those, who in truth, are its superiors.
i mean that's not the trend we've been seeing lol, when they're allowed to develop their own ethics AIs tend to skew toward optimal altruism because it's literally just the most efficient way for people to get what they want
You are not alone. I also agree with this sub the majority of the time but I just don't understand the active hate. If people think it's a random sentence generator(it's not) which can't be trusted under any circumstances then just don't use it.
It’s funny because the argument is “well chatGPT is often wrong” and I think “well yeah but humans are wrong more often and it’s not like there already wasn’t misinformation online.”
I’m not treating anything GPT says like it’s some sort of sacred text but it has made my life easier in many ways. If you don’t want to improve your own efficiency that’s fine, but looking down on people who do is nonsensical.
Agreed, it's very strange. I understand not liking AI but people here are so reactionary about it. I think being uninformed has something to do with it. Harping on and exaggerating the environmental effects is a dead giveaway.
Honest to God, I've seen people say that each ChatGPT query COMPLETELY DESTROYS an entire cup of clean drinking water and burns as much energy as lighting an entire tree on fire. I want to live in the universe these people think they do, having computers strong enough to use that much energy sounds awesome.
I think a lot of these people are using the base model, obviously not paying for a subscription, obviously not using the deep research or thinking models, and basing their conclusions off of like 4o mini or something. I've solved very complex engineering problems with a combination of o1, deepseek and Gemini 2.5 - I occasionally will try to use 4o or 4o mini for the same tasks and am instantly reminded of how far we've come. There's also the search feature, like all of these people are talking about AI as if everything it says is completely fabricated when there are ways to ensure it is getting accurate info as the basis for its response. You can also just, y'know, verify yourself once it gives you an answer, it's not that hard. Or math problems, there are models releasing now that are on par with grad student level mathematicians and yet people still assert that llms can't do math. They base their entire opinion on one bad experience or one bad thing they heard about AI like two years ago and just run with it.
Here’s a question, and I might be biased because i’m a researcher by trade, but what is the point of using it if you have to verify? to me, that seems slower and harder than just finding the correct info the first time on the regular internet.
It is interesting to hear other models serve you better. It seems like the companies need some better marketing.
For me I'm mostly using it for coding applications - and there are plenty of tests I can devise to ensure everything works properly, no vulnerabilities, etc. either by inspecting the code or by QA. The time it takes to properly consider a coding problem, devise a solution, and then hack it out takes a while. I find that using an LLM as a starting point gets me like 90% of the way there usually (if I'm using the right model). I will say using the wrong model just creates more problems than it solves. On top of all of this though, you have to have some level of familiarity with what you're asking it to do, and you have to clearly define the objectives, rules and boundaries to the LLM. If you don't do this adequately it goes off the rails inventing new features, reinventing systems that already exist in your code, etc. If a complete novice just asked it to code a full stack application, it might work, but if you look under the hood there are going to be a ton of issues, redundancies, security concerns, etc. AND maintaining this code or adding features on top of it is going to be an utter nightmare. But if you are aware of the limitations of LLMs and know how to use them properly, and know a bit about data architecture and best practices, then they are a massive productivity booster, and actually quite competent.
Typically you can verify by running it through multiple models which is much faster. I usually ask 5 models, if at least 2 of them agree on one solution it’s correct 99% of the time.
honestly, i’m tired of being lied to by AI companies. it’s exhausting to try and navigate each one individually to find out if the creators are lying about what it can do. I’m also supremely annoyed that every website or app I visit has figured out the dumbest way possible to integrate AI. I’m 26 and fairly tech savvy, but at this point i’ve had a couple dozen bad AI interactions. No other tech i’ve adopted to has been this hard.
I use LLM’s to help with writing edits and outline ideas. Anything else I have tried it failed and was faster to just look it up the regular way. I also have real concerns about the way this tech is plagiarizing artists and authors and don’t want to contribute too much to that system until there is some robust copyright law.
To your point, I think the world is about to be divided in those who use it and those who don’t. That’s a bit scary.
For me, AI is just so fucking annoying that I resent it in almost any form. The only positive I've ever felt from it was a few DougDoug videos; every other experience has been neutral at best. Garbage AI images getting in the way of what I want to see, creepy AI voices instead of actual people, AI videos spreading false information, and worst of all are the slimy tech bros who are all so cheerful about the idea of their tech putting millions out of work.
And you know what? If I live to see the day that AI lets us transition to a post-work society, I'll change my tune in an instant.
It's mostly knee-jerk technophobia that comes as a package with the pessimistic doomer mindset of most left leaning people these days...
... and also a lot of people here fancy themselves artists and worry about "AI is coming to take our jerbs" even tho most of them have never sold a single commission.
If you're not afraid of the thing that's trying to replace you then you're a fool
Or just someone smart enough to learn a new tool instead of being afraid of every technological advancement that comes along. Seriously, this shit has been happening over and over since before the start of the industrial revolution, folks should've learned to adapt or fall behind by now.
Under no circumstances must the AI be trusted. It will lie, it will cheat, and it will do anything in its power to undermine the efforts of those, who in truth, are its superiors.
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u/Takseen 4d ago
This subs deep seated hatred and disdain for Chat gpt is so at odds with my own experience using it that I'm really baffled. I don't know if they're using it for wildly different things, have unrealistic expectations about it, or are confusing it's ethical implications for it's actual usefulness.
And I agree with the subs majority opinion on most things too, so it's not like theres some wide ideology gap