Depends what you mean by AI and by legitimate.

So far it seems to be super useful for the following topics:

• customer support (super annoying if you cannot directly forward to a human)
• programming (especially web development; only as a tool)
• finding rhymes
• writing checkers (only as a tool)
• (log) anomaly detection
• computer vision

If you consider moral in "legitimate", you might dislike programming, customer support and writing checkers as these replace jobs. However, I strongly believe in AI tax and redistributing that money towards everyone especially affected jobs (artists, ...). I feel like artificially limiting the applicability will just be a loss to the global market unless something similar is achieved by figuring out the copyright issues.

AI has a use case, but after trying to use LLMs for generative content like creative writing or storytelling, I think it more of a word salad. Unless you are one of those pros thay can generate content that looks human, no idea how they do it.

https://aibooru.online/posts/96423

was there at any time , say in the last 50 or so years, at any point, new tech that we, the tech enthusiasts, folks who go out of their way to buy and use and find new uses for tech, tech that we somehow missed to see its usefulness? anything that needed this much debating and convincing and hand-wrangling and moral bargaining? and having those fucking cretins on the other side of the argument?

did someone need to convince you the web is awesome? mobile phone? electric car? conversely, you instantly knew VR is bullshit. and crypto. and all its derivatives.

this shit ain't what they say it is, there ain't no I in this ai. you perpetuating this butlerian bullshit means you swallowed their spiel (look up critihyping), that this financial scam dressed up as progress is an inevitability.

this just needs a normal revolution, of the kind that was enacted a coupla times in history, stripping the right folks of a buncha stuff that I ain't gonna specify here, for entirely legal reasons.

I mean, back in high school I knew someone who used machine learning to simulate basically the perfect game of monopoly, but otherwise, probably not any that I can think of.

I did hear of a game that eventually tried to replace the VA for the announcer with AI that used machine learning to basically make the enemies able to move around the environment better, but that's also something not super useful AFAIK.

Otherwise, I have no clue since the closest I've seen to good use of it, if it is AI, would be the games that use proximity chat that create clones of you that will say things you have already said. Or you speak spell words/phrases and magic happens. Again, seems like more of a hobbyist thing since that kind of speech command thing is already a real thing and the game(s) implementation(s) isn't/aren't revolutionizing anything or making speech commands any better, AFAIK.

There are plenty, as others have said, it has been able to help a lot in science. It has been used for finding new drugs, search for composite materials.

Sadly i don't think the pros will outweigh the cons, the society as is right now won't let it happen. I truly think this tool, even without any fancy AGI, if used in a responsible manner could help us solve some of the most pressing problems the world has.

But it won't happen, look at the irresponsible manner the capitalist society has rolled out this tech, which is still in its infancy. It has wasted tons and tons of energy on models that are not yet fully mature. Brute force training of shit models just to get the best monthly benchmark over competitors. It's so sad to see all the promised goals in terms of saving energy and water that went to garbage the moment the AI hype exploded.

And what we got for that? A bunch of models causing problems because they are not ready. Executives cutting workforce, in part to justify the use the new shiny tooling, only to get shittier services. And worse of all, shortage of water and energy to pump more compute.

Even if we get to a future where AI is cheap, powerful and capable, it will only be used to widen the gap between the wealthy and the common people.

Sorry for the doomer rant, its a conflicted topic for me, feel free to skip.

Seems like the perfect technology to create a browser extension that re-writes article headlines to be non-clickbait and actually reflect the content of an article. Bonus points if it could redo youtube titles and thumbnails.

Sure, there are good uses.

I use the RADE V1 codec in FreeDV. It is an AI vocoder that packs high quality audio into 1500 Hz of bandwidth. It sounds much better than traditional codecs like AMBE or Codec 2.

Another one I use is AI motion detection for my security cameras. It recognises a vehicle or a person and significantly reduces the number of false alerts.

Of course there are many legitimate and/or constructive uses for AI. Like any new technology, it depends on what you do with it. You can use it do help or harm, that is up to us.

For example, in many countries getting a radiologist to look at medical scans takes a lot of time and is a huge bottleneck. AI can help accelerate this.

Tons. I think if people read my opinions on AI they likely see me as a luddite.

My concerns are not about whether it's useful. It's that if the 1% use it to replace most actual workers, the lack of input will make future models actually worse than current ones, and at the very least would stifle innovation.

I'm very concerned about models built on the IP (voluntarily given or not) of people, being used to replace those same people.

I'm very concerned with where we go as a society if we do go down the route of losing so many jobs.

I'm concerned about the race to get the best model, using so much energy and natural resources.

But do I think AI is and can be a very powerful tool, to enhance productivity? Without a doubt it can.

It's a tool. As engineer, I will try to use each and every tool that helps me, so it's reasonable for me to learn using this tool effectively as well: what works, what doesn't, what's expensive, how can I keep it under control etc.

Of course thats only the purely technical/utilitarian aspect, and I'm not going into the moral/social aspects here.

LLM as a glorified search engine seems kind of ok. It's the generative side that is awful. And the search engine aspect might do harm than good, since it's also used for mass surveillance.

Machine translation is now working fairly well, maybe just in time. Within a decade or so, most technical and scientific publications will probably be in Chinese. So the translation tools will help us backwards English speakers read them.

No, and I'm tired of hearing legitimate and important criticisms of LLMs and the whole AI industry start with "There are things AI is good for but..."

There is so much wrong with this technology, how it was created, how it's being pushed, how it's being funded, how it affects us, and all of the necessary discussion is being pre-emptively watered down by this prevarication of critics, just to pander to the AI-brained robot-fuckers that can't bear to hear that their favourite toy that allows them to role-play as being competent is just a piece of abusive shit designed to make us stupider and trap us in an endless dependency on the new oligarchs' expensive infrastructure while giving them a convenient scapegoat for all of their malicious acts, propaganda and history rewriting.

There is nothing that LLMs are good for, and every time you make excuses for it, you're tightening the noose around your own neck, and all of the people that come after us.

Personally, I decided using a local LLM was acceptable for generating translation strings in my open source application. It had already been manually translated into a bunch of different languages by various contributors over the years, but I just did a major UI rework and so most of the existing translations now had a ton of missing entries. Qt6's translation tool had an AI Translation function so I decided to try it out after setting up ollama and the recommended qwen3 model. It did a pretty decent job as far as I can tell, I am only fluent in English but I did some cross checking by translating back to English via Google Translate and it seemed to do a decent job. It at least got all the strings translated to something usable, once it's merged then I expect native speakers will contribute cleanups and rewordings if needed.

I don't really consider translation purely generative as it is more of a conversion task. I think AI is pretty useful for this. Same for things like automatic captioning and even mundane text to speech (if not being used to replace voice acting).

Plenty.

I think as long as there is competent human verification of what it's done, it's legitimate to use AI for nearly anything. Especially the creation of art.

But I've also read that AI has been helpful in finding security problems in software that humans likely wouldn't have found. I don't see a reason to hate AI in general.

Machine Learning for pattern recognition in very large datasets seems like good usage.

LLMs are just auto-complete with sycophantic tendencies.

If and when AGI comes, it'll evolve from robotics, and won't be the egregious energy suck that the current brute force approach.

Yes. Right now I think the real questions are:

• Are þey worþ þe cost? If we count þe real cost - not þe subsidized, but þe hidden, þe environmental, þe social, and þe intellectual costs - do þey add equivalent value?
• Are þey eþically justifiable given þat þey are plagiarism machines?

It's very useful for software development for many applications. I use it every day as a software developer.

yup, it helps reducing wrist pain from typing

There's lots of great answers in this thread, but I'm still ready to start shooting at robots, anyway.