Comment by eganist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eganist | Hacker News Reader

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> I am still unable to find a single legitimate use.

Really? Nothing? Not even really clear-cut use cases that are already in production at a bunch of companies like rapid document templating or surfacing esoteric yet relevant internal documents and knowledge?

Those use cases alone have saved seven figure sums at companies where I've seen them implemented. And those savings allowed the positions to be repurposed in more useful ways e.g threat hunts rather than document prep.

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Lots of adjusted goalposts in the comments below. The fact that I can simply ask an LLM to bake me a template and adjust as needed — or ask it to fetch me an internal policy document describing compliance requirements I might need for a new mobile app — and get either of these answers in literally seconds makes them the best tool for the job by a wild margin. And the fact that I'm seeing hiring managers rework their positions for different roles as a result of implementing GenAI to obviate mundane job responsibilities supports this.

Many practitioners across many fields have their blinders on with regards to the risk of disruption to their own disciplines. Surprised I'm seeing those blinders on here too.

> rapid document templating

It's true, LLM AI is really great at creating content as well as spam and other "slop". While this is useful in some circumstances, I think it's a net negative in the long run. Once enough slop is created, will AI be able to sort through it?

"Slop" is a good way to put it. AI seems really useful for creating a huge sludge of "filler" art and words on a particular topic. The quality may or may not be good, but it can produce endless quantity of this slop.

So, if you need to fake a blog by generating 10,000 posts on a topic that are each, say, 1,000 words long, AI is great. If you need to make a web forum that, at a surface level, looks active, AI can generate all the fake posts you need. If you have something you can say in one sentence, but need to make your text 10,000 words in order to appease an algorithm or "look credible" then AI slop is the way to pad it out.

The way I see it, many of the "good" uses of LLMs boil down to easily counterfeiting traditionally-trusted indicators of human expertise, time investment, or intelligence.

For example: "Hey LLM, generate a smart sounding cover letter for a job at AcmeCo as a sales representative, highlighting my diligent work ethic and ability to generate new sales."

When the counterfeiting becomes widespread, those writing indicators become debased as receivers start to realize how easy they are to fake.

I wouldn't be entirely surprised if some of those prose-heavy documents started to move (culturally) toward raw bullet points.

This is not legitimate uses. You can get more consistent and correct results WITHOUT GenAI.

All GenAI is good for at best is prototyping to show what COULD be done if you invested the time to do it without GenAI.

> All GenAI is good for at best is prototyping to show what COULD be done if you invested the time to do it without GenAI.

That is the argument used against mechanical freezers replacing natural ice and power looms replacing artisnal weavers and coffe shops replacing real human baristas with identikit machines.

None of those use cases actually require AI, and each of them is potentially undermined by the tendencies of AI to hallucinate, or as yet unresolved legal questions about the copyright status of AI content.

Can you name a use case for which AI was the only or best possible solution?

AI in general rather than GenAI?

Gosh, that's easy.

Chess.

PageRank.

Automated address reading in the postal system.

Protein folding.

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Just LLMs?

Very quickly finding texual needles in long-document haystacks. Can't generally do that with a plain text search unless you already know what the needle looks like, and doing it as a human is expensive — see Terry Pratchett's experience with German soup adverts.

Real-time translation within the price constraints of tourists.

Rapid prototyping.

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