I promise this question is asked in good faith. I do not currently see the point of generative AI and I want to understand why there’s hype. There are ethical concerns but we’ll ignore ethics for the question.
In creative works like writing or art, it feels soulless and poor quality. In programming at best it’s a shortcut to avoid deeper learning, at worst it spits out garbage code that you spend more time debugging than if you had just written it by yourself.
When I see AI ads directed towards individuals the selling point is convenience. But I would feel robbed of the human experience using AI in place of human interaction.
So what’s the point of it all?
There are some great use cases, for instance transcribing handwritten records and making them searchable is really exciting to me personally. They can also be a great tool if you learn to work with them (perhaps most importantly, know when not to use them - which in my line of work is most of the time).
That being said, none of these cases, or any of the cases in this thread, is going to return the large amounts of money now being invested in AI.
Generative AI is actually really bad at transcription. It imagines dialogues that never happened. There was some institution, a hospital I think? They said every transcription had at least one major error like that.
This is an issue if it’s unsupervised, but the transcription models are good enough now that with oversight then they’re usually useful: checking and correcting the AI generated transcription is almost always quicker than transcribing entirely by hand.
If we approach tasks like these assuming that they are error-prone regardless whether they are done by human or machine, and will always need some oversight and verification, then the AI tools can be very helpful in very non-miraculous ways. I think it was Jason Koebler said in a recent 404 podcast that at Vice he used to transcribe every word of every interview he did as a journalist, but now transcribes everything with AI and has saved hundreds of work hours doing so, but he still manually checks every transcript to verify it.