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I know the reputation that AI has on Lemmy, however I've found that some users (like myself) have found that LLMs can be useful tools

I know the reputation that AI has on Lemmy, however I've found that some users (like myself) have found that LLMs can be useful tools.

Their utility is not questioned. It's their true cost and how they're developed that's the issue.

No doubt a machine able to do some quick and dirty jobs that would take us a lot more time is a fine tool (like mentioned already, denoise, quick text summaries and stuff like that) edit: even complex and highly skilled stuff. The tool is already impressive today, and I don't doubt it will get much better quickly.

The issue is how it learned to do what it can do and how it is monoetized. I mean, learning from humanity common knowledge (no AI at all without it being allowed to learn from us all) and making it... subscription-based for us to use? WTF? The issue is also how it is destroying many things in the exclusive profit of a handful of very rich people and their shareholders. The issue is how we, mankind, have zero control over a tool that is threatening to make a lot of us go bankrupt...

Feel free to downvote, obviously.

And to answer your question:

What AI tools have you found useful?

I would say, the off button... of which there is none I can find.

Those that I find the most useful are those that I (and likely many others) tend to take for granted.

For example, fuzzy logic may very well be used in electronics that involve temperature control - fridge, aircon, rice cooker, water heater - under the hood.

Another one is CSP (constraint-satisfaction problems) solvers which tend to be used in scheduling softwares. A possible use case is public transportation.

There are probably lots more AIs working behind the scenes that benefit everyone, but don't get the coverage because they are just boring tech now. People may not even consider them AI!

I appreciate these AI for making my life so convenient.

I use predictive AI for certain classification tasks daily at work, however I call that Deep Learning and not AI. I don't want to be too specific, but you can imagine we are classifying certain objects - is this a traffic light, is this a tree etc. It is a task that cannot be solved geometrically very good, so Deep Learning is the perfect use case there.

I know people dislike and complain about it, but I absolutely love Suno. LOVE IT. I’ve created what I think are some really cool songs. Will they ever be hits on the radio? Nope. Will anyone else listen to them besides me? Probably not. But boy, after tweaking, I’d rather listen to some of the songs I’ve created than the garbage on the radio!

GPT to write emails

I've been self-hosting my own AI stuff for a bit using Ollama. I use it to create images, design a tattoo, run a chatbot, write emails, write code and commit-messages, run a D&D game, explain concepts that I'm not familiar with, translate languages, etc.

I've been toying with different models, and I'm not sure that I have one that I would say is a goto. I am liking Ollama to be able to easily pull in and test new LLMs, as well as Stable-Diffusion for image generation/modification.

If we are talking chatbots I see them as another level of abstraction to search and is useful but I have concerns on the energy use. Other uses I have encountered is just sorta a convenience thing. Where it can do a bunch of things that individual software can do but at a one stop shop. I have not directly been involved in other aspects but im aware how they are baked into things like facial recognition and tracking and such.

I like it for coming up with quick, modular code that produces whatever direct result I want without having to reivent the wheel provided I more or less understand how it works and how to tweak it to refine what I want or how it does it

I'm running ollama and open-webui and some unsloth modified models for some general purpose stuff.

The https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507-GGUF model has been pretty good. Beware it's a Chinese model so you can get some funny results if you ask about Tiananmen Square or if certain people resemble Winnie the Pooh. For making Linux configurations it works great.

Some gemma3 models are okay but it doesn't seem as good. Same for Phi4 models.

For some situations I used Copilot to script an auto-translator for XML-EPG in bash.

For that it worked okay enough.

The only time I've seen real use from an ai tool is at work, we are using it to get data from an invoice/quote/etc from the pdf that we get emailed to data that we can put in the database. It's not a perfect solution, but there isn't really anything else we can find other than getting people to do it, which is slower and more expensive.

I think I’ve found the one area where LLMs really excel: business books / self help literature. The real life examples in that genre are pretty awful and dragged out as it is, so you can’t really make it much worse, now can you? The information density is kept low to fluff up the page count, and oh boy, are LLMs good at that. So, if you want to become a self help guru, but can’t be bothered to write your own book about magical hotels, marriage advice, productivity tips and communication, LLMs can take care of that for you. Copilot has turned out to work well for projects like that.

If you raise the bar, you’re going to have to read and edit the text manually. You also need to keep track of what has already been mentioned elsewhere and avoid repeating them again, depending on the genre. In business books though, that’s not a problem at all.

BTW, if you wonder about the downvotes, it’s because Asklemmy@lemmy.world isn’t a safe space for AI related discussions. Consider posting somewhere else.

I was testing a lot of tools for work (UX), but they all sucked. Basically I just use gpt, cursor for tab coding,l and image generation for various purposes (Leonardo).

Most apps work poorly and using a model directly works better.

I worked on a few apps that use ai without a chat bot, but we found users expected one, maybe that will change in the future.

I’ve enjoyed messing with Perplexity and Duck AI.

I chat with llm's to help me remember shit I already know, or to change the tone of stuff I write but thats about it.

I mostly use it to generate smut for gooning. It's useful for that. Chat gpt is absolutely filthy if you get it going the right way.