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Great for giving incantatons for ffmpeg, imagemagick, and other power tools.
"Use ffmpeg to get a thumbnail of the fifth second of a video."
Anything where syntax is complicated, lots of half-baked tutorials exist for the AI to read, and you can immediately confirm if it worked or not. It does hallucinate flags, but fixes if you say "There is no --compress flag" etc.
This is the way.
LLMs are pretty good at reverse dictionary lookup. If I'm struggling to remember a particular word, I can describe the term very loosely and usually get exactly what I'm looking for. Which makes sense, given how they work under the hood.
I've also occasionally used them for study assistance, like creating mnemonics. I always hated the old mnemonic I learned in school for the OSI model because it had absolutely nothing to do with computers or communication; it was some arbitrary mnemonic about pizza. Was able to make an entirely new mnemonic actually related to the subject matter which makes it way easier to remember: "Precise Data Navigation Takes Some Planning Ahead". Pretty handy.
I've done lots of cool things with AI. Image manipulation, sound manipulation, some simple videogames.
I've never found anything cool to do with an LLM.
Care to expand on sound manipulation? Are you talking about for removing background noise from recordings or something else?
Some speech recognition work, some selective gain adjustments –not just amplifying certain bands of frequencies, but trying to write a robot that can identify a specific instrument and amplify or mute just that. Also fun with throwing cellular automata at sound files. And with throwing cellular automata at image files to turn them into sound files.
That all sounds pretty neat. Do you do these things locally or is there a cloud service for that?
I’m piping my in house camera to Gemini. Funny how it comments our daily lives. I should turn the best of in a book or something.
Another one;
Night Hall Motion Detected, you left the broom out again, it probably slid a little against the wall. I bemoan my existence, is this what life is about? Reporting on broom movements?
Yeah I have a full collection of super sarcastic shit like that.
Do you take any precautions to protect your privacy from Google or are you just like, eh, whatever?
Absolutely « whatever ». I became quite cynical after working for a while in telco / intelligence / data and AI. The small addition of a few pic is just adding few contextual clues to what they have already.
It's good for boring professional correspondence. Responding to bosses emails and filling out self evaluations that waste my time
I'm an author working on an online story series. Just finished S04. My editing was shit and I could not afford to pay someone to do it for me.
So I write the story, rewrite the story, put it through GPT to point out irregularities, grammatical errors, inconsistencies etc, then run it through Zoho's Zia for more checks and finally polish it off with a final edit of my own. This whole process takes around a year.
Overall, quality improved, I was able to turn around stuff quicker and it made me a lot more confident about the stuff I am putting out there.
I also use Bing image creator for the artwork and have seen my artwork improve dramatically from what Dream (Wombo) used to generate.
Now I am trying to save up to get a good GPU so that I can run Stable Diffusion so that I can turn it into a graphic novel.
Naturally I would like to work with an artist cause I can't draw but everyone I meet asks for 20 - 30k dollars deposit to do the thing. Collaborations have been discussed and what I've learnt is that as times get tough, people are requesting for greater shares in the project than I, the originator, have. At some point when I was discussing with an artist, he was side lining me and becoming the main character. I'm not saying that all artists are like this, but dang, people can be tough to deal with.
I respect that people have to eat, but I can't afford that and I have had this dream for years so finally I get a chance to pull it off. My dream can't die without me giving it my best so this is where I am with AI.
You don’t strictly need a huge GPU. These days, there are a lot of places for free generations (like the AI Horde), and a lot of quantization/optimization that gets things running on small VRAM pools if you know where to look. Renting GPUs on vast.ai is pretty cheap.
Also, I’d recommend languagetool as a locally runnable (and AI free/CPU only) grammar checker. It’s pretty good!
As for online services, honestly Gemini Pro via the AI Studio web app is way better and way more generous than ChatGPT, or pretty much anything else. I don’t like using Google, but if I’m not paying them a dime…
Well, if I am going to push this into the project I envision, privacy is going to be key, so everything will be done locally. I have privacy concerns about running on someone else's hardware regardless of the provided guardrails and layers of protection I can provide for myself.
I used to use Languagetool and Scribens but found my current working model as the best for me at the moment. I will definitely look at options as I move to the next chapter so Languagetool is still an option. Also, I believe they went AI too? At least online?
Well, if I am going to push this into the project I envision, privacy is going to be key, so everything will be done locally.
Reasonable! And yes languagetool has some online AI thing, probably a junky wrapper around an LLM API TBH.
One thing I’d be wary of is… well, showing you’re using AI?
As a random example, I helped clean up a TV show a long time ago, with mixed results. More recently, I brought the idea of making another attempt to the fandom, and got banned for even considering “AI,” with most of them clearly oblivious to how the original restoration was made… I have a little personal writing project going too, and wouldn’t dare bring it up to the fandom either.
I don’t know what’s involved in your project, but be aware that you may get some very hostile interaction if it’s apparent you use diffusion models and LLMs as helpers.
I've been planning for two years now on how to successfully put this together.
First thing I realised I would have to learn is tools like Blender, Gimp (which I will likely replace with Krita), etc. cause regardless of how well AI produces, you need to tidy things up.
Then there is story boarding. No amount of AI can replace professionalism. So this is an important skill to have.
Then there are the layouts. All that. I learnt how to use Scribus for layouts and Inkscape is always handy.
My main struggle will be maintaining consistency which has improved consistently over the last two years, and I've been reading a ton of comics to learn the sort of views and angles they use.
I can't allow AI to generate text for me, cause that loses the plot. I might as well just prompt a story up and put it on Amazon and move on. I don't want to do that. Instead I let it suggest better phrasing, words, basically a better editor.
I also created my own theme and it, very nicely, points out when I lose the plot. I then ask it to point out where my story sucks and it will also point that out. If I run my text through an AI text detector, I get like 1-2% written by AI which I believe any AI language tool would do. It points out where it detects the AI written text and I work on it and remove the text. GPT has a habit of adding its own text and does not stick to the boundaries set.
Finding specific words in an MP3 log file for our radio station. Free app called Vibe transcribes locally.
Employment. I got a job with one of the big companies in the field. Very employee-focused. Good pay. Great benefits. Commute is 8 miles. Smart, pleasant, and capable co-workers.
As far as using the stuff - nope. Don't use it at all.
No
I've used llms to generate dialogue trees for a game and generate data with coordinates to describe the layout of the game world. in some ways it can replace procedural generation code.
Table top games?
video game
Made a product search script that sorts eBay listings based on total per unit price (including shipping). Good for finding the cheapest multi-pack, lot, bundle, etc. by unit. Using Qwen 3 4B and feeding it a single listing at a time to parse.
Do you self host or use one of the Free™ cloud services?
Self host. Just Ollama running on a machine without a GPU! I never said it was fast. :D
So you'll copy and paste the URL for an eBay listing and it'll go out and fetch the price and quantity and calculate unit price?
Getting my ollama instance to act as Socrates.
It is great for introspection, also not being human, I'm less guarded in my responses, and being local means I'm able to trust it.
I bought a cheap barcode scanner and scanned all my books and physical games and put it into a spreadsheet. I gave the spreadsheet to ChatGPT and asked it to populate the titles and ratings, and genre. Allows me to keep them in storage and easily find what I need quickly.
The image generator to 3D model to animation pipeline isn't too bad. If you're not a great visual artist, 3D modeler, or animator you can get out pretty decent results on your own that would normally take teams of multiple people dozens of hours after years of training
I use it for books/movies/music/games recommandations (at least while it isn't used for ads...). You can ask for an artist similar to X or a short movie in genre X. The more demanding you are the better, like a "funny scifi book in the YA genre with a zero to hero plot".
I love fantasy worldbuilding and write a lot. I use it as a grammar checker and sometimes use it to help gather my thoughts, but never as the final product.
Nope. Any use case I have tried with it, I usually find that either a python script, database, book, or piece of paper can always accomplish the same job but usually with a better end result and with a more reliably reproducible outcome.
ChatGPT kind of sucks but is really fast. DeepSeek takes a second but gives really good or hilarious answers. It’s actually good at humor in English and Chinese. Love that it’s actually FOSS too
Legitimately, no. I tried to use it to write code and the code it wrote was dog shit. I tried to use it to write an article and the article it wrote was dog shit. I tried to use it to generate a logo and the logo it generated was both dog shit and raster graphic, so I wouldn’t even have been able to use it.
It’s good at answering some simple things, but sometimes even gets that wrong. It’s like an extremely confident but undeniably stupid friend.
Oh, actually it did do something right. I asked it to help flesh out an idea and turn it into an outline, and it was pretty good at that. So I guess for going from idea to outline and maybe outline to first draft, it’s ok.
One day I'm going to get around to hooking a local smart speaker to Home Assistant with ollama running locally on my server. Ideally, I'll train the speech to text on Majel Barrett's voice and be able to talk to my house like the computer in Star Trek.
I’ve used LLMs to reverse engineer some recipes.
Can you make an example?
I can’t be too specific without giving away my location, but I’ve recreated a sauce that was sold by a vegan restaurant I used to go to that sold out to a meat-based chain (and no longer makes the sauce).
The second recipe was the seasoning used by a restaurant from my home state. In this case the AI was rather stupid: its first stab completely sucked and when I told it it said something along the lines of “well employees say it has these [totally different] ingredients.”