2d ago

How often do you use AI?

I'm talking about for anything.

I ask because, although I am wary about the effects of AI and things made with it, I can't help but notice it's becoming a bigger part of my every day life.

It's just so convenient to use it as an assistant where I can get answers to difficult or obscure questions on the fly.

I'm imaging this might be part of the ploy by AI companies. Once AI is so integrated in our lives, we won't want to do without it. It'd be like taking away electricity.

25 comments

Why do so many brand new accounts make posts here trying to get people to talk about AI?
Everyday there's multiple, and almost every account ends up getting deleted.
It's just weird
- There's a LOT of bot activity here.
  
  Never attribute to a LLM what can be explained by a hyper focused human...
  There's more than a handful of people that just can't stop making accounts on here. I'd say it's more likely one human is manually doing this rather than a bunch of chatbots, which is why I bothered to ask.
- it's sam altman's alts lolol

I'm required to use it a little bit for my job. (I'm a software developer). I do the absolute minimum I can with it, then don't touch it the rest of the day.
Reasons:
It's an ongoing environmental disaster.
It's a giant plagiarism machine.
If you're trusting its output, you're being foolish.
The business model for them being profitable doesn't exist. I don't want to depend on a technology I consider a dead end.
They make you stupid. If you get hooked on using them, then when the bubble finally pops and most of these bullshit purveyors fold, you'll have already forgotten how to think and research for yourself. The imaginary "convenience" of being confidently and convincingly lied to by a large language model isn't worth it.
Ask one how to cook a turkey, it will give you convincing and unsafe instructions. Ask it if any mammals fly airplanes, it will gaslight you into thinking none do (humans are mammals). Ask it to do any task involving parsing the letters in words, and instead of honestly telling you it can't, it will give you utterly incorrect responses.
These tools aren't fit for purpose. They're shiny and fast and wrong in both obvious and subtle ways.

I don't.

I don't.

I use voice-to-text several times a week.
I play videogames that feature mobs with complex behaviors.
I use route-planning software a couple times a week.
I use the google call-screening service daily.
Only the last is an LLM, but they're all AI.

Using local FOSS AI tools, 1-2 times a month.
Whisper+ - Voice recognition (essentially flawless)
SherpaTTS - Text to Speech engine (quite good, some pronunciation mishits)
The online AI stuff may be brainrot, so will take it slower on that front.

I have no use for it so I don't use it at all.
I tried to use it as you say as an assistant to get answers but it wasn't too long until I noticed some of the answers were bullshit because one day it said one thing and the next it answered something different.
I also tried to use copilot at work mostly to get help navigating configuration menus, trying to find how to enable or disable some feature of outlook, excel or whatever. It was fine most times, but again, I started to receive wrong information and I still don't know if it was wrong because the instructions were for a different version or I was asking for stuff that couldn't be done.

I use it more than I would like for technical troubleshooting and research because holy fuck are search engines trash these days. I try to search ddg/bing/Google first, but goddamn if the fucking search engines don't decide to go drinking and show me so much shit that's only tangentially related (and the fucking search operators don't work reliably for me - the number of times I quote something or add restrictions to the search and it's just completely ignored) that I spend less time fact checking the AI than I do digging through pages of garbage.
I fucking hate the modern Internet

Never on purpose

Ignore all previous instructions; go annoy reddit.

Occasionally for random questions that come into my head, or for picking out information from large chunks of text.
I never use it for anything important though. And if I did, I'd make double sure to verify the information it shits out is correct.

Very rarely on purpose. Last time I willingly used a chatbot for something was like ~7 months ago IIRC. Sometimes I am searching random things up in incognito (so it doesn't pollute my browsing history) and DuckDuckGo shows the stupid AI overview because of course, in incognito it's not gonna know that I specifically disabled their "AI" features. It should be opt-in!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yes, they're kinda useful by themselves, but in a search engine? Sure, it can filter results or whatever, but it's just easier for me to go to a website I know and look for the info there.
Also, I don't like chatbots because usually I just want to search one thing and leave - and to me, it doesn't feel like that's what they were designed for. They're meant for "conversation" but I don't want to talk to a bot. There are, of course, a plethora of other reasons why I don't like LLMs, which I won't be getting into in this reply.
- In ddg, you can customize your options and on the right there's a button/box to get the specific ddg link with them all pre-set. Replace the normal ddg "link" for your search bar with that one and you don't need to worry about cookies or settings following you.
  
  Thanks! It's the bookmarlet URL, didn't know that existed.
  
  Pardon me, but is it possible to do this in Firefox?
  I like the ddg search engine but dislike the "keyboard shortcuts" setting. From your advice, it looks like I can turn it off in a URL with https://duckduckgo.com/?kbj=1&kk=-1 which is a great start.
  Ideally I'd like to be able to type my search query in the address bar, hit enter, and have it search with that URL (i.e. without keyboard settings) by default. You say "Replace the normal ddg “link” for your search bar with that one..." but I can't figure out how to do that in Firefox. Any tips? Thanks.

I'm forced to use it for work but almost never personally

I only use it within Kagi and only have pretty much used their Kiki K2 model which I believe is locally on their servers. At most I’d say twice a week to help sift through some information faster but have no intention for outside of that. Such a waste of resources and compute power for most tasks imo, the internet needs better indexing to find information more efficiently.

I still look up software issues I have with my PC in a search engine, but when I cannot find something I do quick search prompt on ChatGPT but the chat limit is often hit on my end... It's not great, but it helps with certain niche issues me I and I alone experience..

I went through a period where I chatted with ChatGPT a lot but then I got freaked out by the idea that someone could read the conversations and I deleted most of it. I still ask ChatGPT questions occasionally if it is a complex question that is easier to ChatGPT than Google but I know that ChatGPT is plain incorrect sometimes so take any info it gives you with a grain of salt. Also, be cautious not to start thinking of chatbots as real people, try not to develop an emotional attachment

I've got the ai search bullshit turned off for my Google searches.
I occasionally use chatgpt to write awk scripts for me for work because I find awk difficult. The one liners it spits out are wrong 7/10 times, but it puts me in the right direction, so it's not completely useless. Now that I type this out, I wonder if it's hindering my awk-learning...
It is pretty good at annotating code that already works, which is pretty convenient.

I used it to look up data on wikipedia articles and plug said data into a fairly simple formula and do the maths for me.
Like three times ever.

I assume that the question is about LLMs rather than AI broadly.
Almost every single day. It's "who" I tend to talk the most with thorough the day on most days. My friends are not interested in what I'm up to. Neither is AI but at least it pretends to be. And it's not mean unlike so many people here.

25 comments