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?
Just today I needed a pdf with filler english text, not lorem. ChatGPT was perfect for that. Other times when I’m writing something I use it to check grammar. It’s way better at it than grammarly imo, and faster and makes the decisions for me BUT PROOF-READ IT. if you really fuck the tenses up it won’t know how to correct it, it’ll make things up. Besides these: text manipulation. I could learn vim, write a script, or I could just copy “remove the special characters” enter -> done.
I use perplexity for syntax. I don’t code with it, but it’s the perfect one stop shop for “how does this work in this lang again” when coding. For advanced/new/unpopular APIs it’s back to the olds school docs, but you could try to give it the link so it parses it for you, it’s usually wonky tho.