And if ChatGPT made a mistake? How would you know before it’s to late ?
Most of my qualms with AI aren't in the usage of AI, but in its creation (water usage, mass layoffs, etc.—you've heard it all before).
To me it's like asking "What are some good uses for slaves?" (An extreme example to show the point, I'm not trying to say AI is the same as slavery).
Like yeah I could find good uses for it, but should it exist in the first place?
The technology itself is novel and cool. Its the complete and utter meltdown of all tech companies into brainless hype machines that is harmful, which is course, is a function of capitalist incentive and the need for the tech industry to come out with some new paradigm shifting innovation every decade. A normal, healthy society would have been able to leverage machine learning and LLM technology where its most useful, like parsing large amounts of data, or running a local instance on your computer to ask a few questions, etc. We wouldn't see LLMs in every text editor, pencilcase and pair on sneakers but these snake oil salesmen who run the US economy are absolutely desperate for a new paradigm shift so they can keep making exponentially more money.
The thing is, we don't need to build these datacenters siphoning comically evil amounts of energy from the grid and making personal compute a thing of the past. Average everyday person doesn't need cloud compute, they can run a local 4b parameter (very, very small) model on their laptop or phone if they need to ask chatgpt to make them a workout routine or to ask them who won the 1918 world series. But these fucking cretins don't care, that's not the point, they are in this because it's a golden ticket to growth city and once they cash their check they don't give one hot fuck about the human-spirit-stealing-machine they built.
TLDR: our society is broken and that's why we keep getting the shittiest, lowest-common-denominator version of everything. everything has to suck by definition because that's the only version that the system we built will allow.
Accurate
For every small benefit, there are disastrous mistakes. We shouldn't discuss one without the other:
https://tech.co/news/list-ai-failures-mistakes-errors
March 2026
February 2026
January 2026
Study reveals that fixing AI mistakes takes up to 40% of the time that it saves
An AI tool used by ICE to identify applicants with previous law enforcement experience falsely flagged applicants with no such experience, leading to the placement of unqualified recruits in field offices.
December 2025
November 2025
Google Antigravity deletes entire content of user’s computer drive
Report finds AI hallucinations in 490 court filings from the past six months
October 2025
Teenager handcuffed after AI mistakes Doritos packet for gun
Lawyer submits AI-assisted court filing with fake citations
Man follows ChatGPT advice over stopping eating salt, develops rare condition. The man was hospitalized, sectioned, and eventually treated for psychosis. He tried to escape the hospital within 24 hours of being admitted.
ChatGPT-5 jailbroken with 24 hours of release
July 2025
AI Coding app deletes entire company database
McDonald’s AI chatbot error exposes data of 64 million job applicants
AI program is tasked with running a small shop, goes insane, claims to be human
Apple Intelligence falsely presents BBC headline
... and it just keeps going.
So don't put AI in front of anything mission critical or without going through a review of a human.
So LLMs in agentic mode are a disaster waiting to happen.
God yes.
AI has uses in the medical, scientific, and disabled communities. I've seen it helping blind people with shopping, with Google glasses or whatever reporting what they've picked up and describing it to them. It can also identify/predict cancer tissue early.
Generative AI is peak laziness and the death of human creativity. Using AI for companionship has a nasty effect on mental health.
AI should have only ever been an assistant in medical/scientific research in my opinion, simply because it's so damaging to the environment, economy, and society.
I have a friend at work that does a lot of video. He films weddings, music videos etc. and is making a pilot for Netflix. He uses AI to go through all his footage and tag it according to content. E.g. if he needs a clip of birds, he can just search ‘birds’ and it will pull up all relevant footage. Incredibly useful.
translation is pretty good.
they want to make ai npcs on games, which could be awesome if we can ever reduce the system requirements for running it.
I tried out a game/demo thing that was a tester for AI NPC dialogue. I asked an NPC to tell me about himself and he replied that he could not connect to server lol
There's that one silly vampire game which uses AI NPCs, I think it's kind of fun looking from people I saw play it
Converting PDFs into HTMLs or RFT/TXT docs witout OCR typos. Until recently, it was almost impossible to turn a scanned book from PDF into doc or TXT, because the output of copying and pasting or converting using PDF tools was illegible. AI now can do a “deep AI seek” (look it up) into the texts.
I am converting a textbook into an audiobook in HTML (paragraph highlighting with manual sync) with an integrated popup glossary into every word (with grammar and meaning) and dictionary lookup if clicked.
Besides, as an apendix to each chapter, I add all the explanations from the book.
I took the ~4 500 words of the book and asked for a grammar analysis and meaning lookup to create a glossary. The IA joyfully skipped many terms but that is something I will fix when each chapter is finished. Now I am being punished with waiting despite having paid $20.
LLMs tend to be a “jack of all trades, master of none”. You are likely to find them useful for helping you with something you are inexperienced at, but not at something you are an expert in. However, because they lie a lot, it’s best to double-check your information, but the LLM can still be helpful with the ”you don’t know what you don’t know” issue.
Curating massive music libraries. I've been using a small embedding model to organise my music for DJing, and being able to generate a t-sne plot clustered on perceptual similarity has been wonderfully useful.
I've also found CLIP models useful for searching videos, just embed a screenshot every couple of min of footage and query with a description of the scene.
And as bad as generated subtitles can be, when the only other option is nothing at all they are pretty nice to have.
If we're strictly talking about LLMs: Certain accessibility services - MAYBE. Writing closed captions / transcription for the most part requires little "human" touch. If we ASSUME that AI will be able to it reliably one day - because it really can't yet - that's one thing that would benefit society.
Image descriptions is another thing I might see done by AI one day but that still requires an understanding of what's actually important about the image.
I'm a therapist. I use HIPAA compliant AI to generate my (editable) case notes for my sessions now. Not only is it a huge time saver to simply edit a generated note as opposed to making one from scratch, but in many cases it takes more detailed notes, including quotes from clients.
I have heard of other therapists and medical doctors also using AI to help with diagnosing.
The danger is when therapistsdon't review the content to check for accuracy. Because occasionally it will generate something not really reflective of what the therapist might have been doing, or it might lack detail that the therapist might have otherwise inclused. But more often the stuff it comes up with is surprisingly accurate.And editing is even easier when you can just tell the AI something like, "include more details about how the client noticed their pattern of putting their own feelings last," and it just does what you asked. You don't necessarily have to edit manually, though you can.
I dislike this immensely and actively seek health care providers that don't use these tools.
My core problem is that I want a professional who engages with me as a human and knows me.
I'm a professional (not in health care) but I "know" all of my clients, and I don't think that's an unreasonable expectation for a client or patient. When I pay $100 to talk to a GP for 10 minutes, I don't think it's too much to ask for them to have a conversation with me, really truly listen to me, and spend a few minutes writing some notes.
In the case of a mental health professional the time spent after an appointment with a patient is much greater. I don't really want what I've said to be automatically converted to notes for a human to review. I want a human to consider the human to human conversation we have had, in the context of other conversations we have had and the relationship I have with them, and use those insights to produce appropriate documentation.
Finally, I have a strongly held belief that relying on the assistance of gen AI reduces one's skills and abilities. For example, consider two therapists who have just completed their education and accreditation and start seeing patients. One uses gen AI to produce notes for every patient, the other eschews this practice. Ten years later, which therapist would you really trust to listen to patients and be able to distill the key elements of the conversation both spoken and unspoken?
That said, I'm aware that these services are becoming an industry standard. I suppose they may help therapists see more patients, and in the context of public health that might be a good thing. Whether or not I would use a service like this if I were a therapist is a difficult question to answer. If I were just starting out I think I probably would. That is to say my beef isn't with you personally using a service like this, more that it's becoming an industry standard.
I understand those concerns and I think there's validity. But there's also enormous potential for benefit.
I know of several therapists who are very good at being present with a client but terrible at documentation. And if one of these has a busy day or two it is easy to get behind. By the time they get around to writing the note the details are very fuzzy. Human memory is notoriously unreliable. A therapist I respect has said that if you're writing a note 24 hours or more after the session, you're probably writing fiction. A tool like this has the potential to greatly help the documentation process. But I agree that it should never become a replacement. I thoroughly read all my notes and often make edits to make them more relevant to me.
An attorney I know who specializes in representing therapists and regularly conducts legal and ethics trainings has also said that from a legal standpoint, when comparing human to AI generated notes, the AI notes are usually superior. They contain details like quotes and they automatically include all the stuff that matters for legal or insurance requirements. This attorney is VERY risk averse and honestly I thought she would have been against this, expecting horror stories like artifacts. Her opinion was a factor in me trying it out.
Again, I stress that this is a tool and not a replacement. When I read through a note, I am considering the things my clients said and my interventions to see if it matches up. It's not perfect but it is very good and I've regularly been surprised with how helpful it can be.
Thanks for a considered response. As in all things, there's nuance and I acknowledge there are benefits.
I'm genuinely curious as to whether you think reliance on this service will diminish someone's opportunity to build the related skills?
I think that given human nature, there will certainly be some providers who overly rely on it. There are already therapists and other professionals who cut corners where they shouldn't in a variety of ways. Probably the most common example of this is when therapists write bare-bones notes with practically no useful information to bridge one session to the next. That's been happening since documentation was a legal requirement.
However, as always, any serious professional is going to take the time to do it right. They will understand how to use a tool effectively while keeping their skills sharp. In my field, with this tool, that would mean every note is read and edited so that it is truly useful. For example, editing the content of the note so that it can be interpreted through the therapist's theoretical orientation.
I would hope that training programs and continuing education providers emphasize that any note they sign, including one generated by AI, is one that they are still legally responsible for. So it behooves them to always read it thoroughly and check it for accuracy.
With any new tool, certain skills will diminish but new skills will be developed. So writing skills may suffer, but good therapists will be good at editing and using effective prompts to get a good note.
Also, for what it's worth, documentation skills and intervention skills are very different. I have known a few excellent therapists who were absolute shit at documenting. These therapists tend to be so naturally gifted and intuitive that they don't need to document very well to be effective. And many therapists write very good notes but are mediocre at the actual therapy. So, at least for now, I tend to see the potential pros as outweighing the potential cons. That could change though!
Running automated hacking and blackmail campaigns against AI companies.
Anything that's fuzzy and impossible to automate with traditional algorithms, but that also has a reasonably high tolerance for error. It just makes up stuff a good portion of the time, you see.
However, I’ve found some benefits with AI. For example, I’m chatting with ChatGPT on credit cards, because it is something I may lean towards getting into. It’s helping me better understand than most people have tried explaining to me. Simply because it is giving me a more stream-lined response than people just beating the bush.
Watch out, personal finance is not one of those things.
Learning, exploring concepts and ideas.
I actually find it pretty helpful for tech support stuff. It doesn't always get it right, but it's usually at least in the right general area and TBH it beats going through endless forums where the answer is buried among 8 pages of people bickering about nothing, or those ones where someone has your exact problem and then replies "nm I fixed it" and doesn't say what they did.
Chatbots? Basically nothing. Any interaction I have with one leads to spending more time verifying its output, inevitably finding many mistakes, and eventually finding a primary source for what I'm actually looking for. The best actual impact it has is forcing me to narrow down my nebulous question into what I actually specifically want, but the bot itself is contributing very little to that.
Neutral nets in general have limited real usefulness in analyzing large batches of data when other purpose-built analysis software doesn't exist.
"AI" is a misnomer and there is absolutely zero evidence to suggest that we're even on a path toward actual AI, sometimes called AGI, though they're also changing that to just mean a profitable LLM which is fucking hilarious.
Any task you use a bot to do, you will become worse at that task. For mass data analysis, that's fine, poring over reams of data is already a skill that other technology has largely obsoleted. But using it to do research, to read or write for you, or god forbid to make actual decisions and think for you, are very slippery slopes that are already causing a lot of the general public to seriously erode their basic mental capabilities.
An amazing use for it in audio engineering is for feedback suppression. The old way to give yourself more headroom required you to sit there and turn up the gain until feedback happens and cut that frequency. Now you just turn on the feedback suppression and it does all that for you on the fly. It's game changing for live sound, every major venue has it now.
Great for film sound too. You're filming a rainy scene and the rain is way to loud? You had to get the actors into the studio and do voiceover, now you can often just filter it out.
I went to my local neighborhood association because I wanted to improve where I live. I was elected president of the association a couple months later, mostly because no one else wanted to do it. It's a fairly poor part of a medium sized city in the U.S.
I've been using AI (running locally on a computer I built that isn't connected to the internet, to reduce harm to the environment) to apply for grants, plan events and help me run the meetings.
It is actually perfect for the job. Saying that as someone who thinks AI is mostly hype and useless for the majority of its current common uses these days. I feed it the text from city grant applications or ask it to make a poster to increase attendance and it's saved me a lot of time. Without it, being someone diagnosed ADHD, I would not have been able to do most of the stuff I have accomplished so far.
Accesibility.
rubberducking for those with social anxiety. Also small friction to get surface level answers that normally took digging from multiple sources.
it's a study monster that initially wiped chegg, duolingo, sparknotes etc. The double edge is that people forgot how to take notes, learn fundamentals to handle complex problems.
I agree there is a lot of annoying hype. However i also agree there are some specific use cases where it can be helpful.
I for one find it handy some times when i am writing bash scripts to do things on my system. I obviously check them before running but it does save time.
Although i do recommend running models locally if possible as it is obviously preferable from a privacy and cost standpoint.
I have a script that uses yt-dlp to get subtitles off a YouTube video and summarises the main points for me with a language model so that I don’t have to watch a 20 minute top10 list video that could’ve been a buzzfeed article.
The whole thing is fully vibe engineered too.
In computational biology / biotechnology, LLMs are being trained on biological sequences and can then be used to generate new genes or genetic variants. These genes can be placed into bacteria who are then fed with e.g. sugar to make them produce various valuable molecules from renewable resources instead of from crude oil using conventional chemistry. There is also work on enabling plastic biodegradation this way.
I use it to extract structured data out of an unstructured source were programmatic approaches would fail.
I regularly use CoPilot to search Microsoft documentation for me. E.g. I needed to find a particular interface in Entra and couldn't remember where it was. So, I asked CoPilot and it got me to the right spot. I've thought about asking it about Microsoft licensing, but I figure that might result in CoPilot becoming self aware enough to kill itself.
I also use a number of AI agents built into the cybersecurity tools I use on a daily basis. Generally stuff along the lines of "find all the cases related to this system/IP/user/etc" type queries. It's also good for questions like "how do I tune this alert" so I don't have to remember whatever bullshit process this vendor put together for tuning false positives. Our primary SIEM/SOAR tool has an AI which does initial triage and investigation work and it's not terrible. It struggles with correlations for more complex events, usually highlighting events which have no bearing on the event in question. But, it often provides a good first pass and description our first line analysts can use to start a real investigation.
AI is a tool. And like a lot of tools, it has it's benefits and limitations. The problem is we're still figuring all those out and the people marketing these tools don't want to admit to the limitations and they over-sell the benefits, then blame the user when those benefits don't materialize. Given how much modern economies are based on information and knowledge, I do expect AI to have some lasting impact, but I also expect that we'll adapt and it will just be another way of getting things done in a generation or two.
I was sitting in a restaurant the other day and staring at the menu. It was Italian and none of the things made sense. Too wordy and not clear what was meat and what was fancy cheese. The waiter was utterly useless - too busy to help and when present, not answering my questions about what would be a good simple pasta in white sauce.
I took a photo and asked Claude what’s a good white sauce pasta which would be like Alfredo.
It found two options I hadn’t even looked at. AI is good at sorting through complexity. But I don’t just mean AI as in LLMs. It needs a lot more tools and knowledge to be useful. So what you need is a smart system which may or may not have AI as a component.
seems to be decent for OCR, maybe also speech recognition. i hear it's okay for finding some concept you can explain abstractly but don't know the exact word for, but haven't tried this personally.
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~