@Lea or maybe just people always had a wrong idea of what early AI would look like?

People just expected it to jump out fully formed as a super-genius rather than baby steps of abilities...

@Lea yeah, that's a fundamental misunderstanding of how these came to be... your examples of non-generative AI are all the same basic technology. In crude terms it's an image enhancement/recognition ai run in reverse. (Then LLMs were cutting out the image part)

Their training process is nearly identical in fact.

@Lea I've seen a whole bunch of practical beneficial uses:

• I use it personally as a coding assistant (great for repetitive code entry where it'll automatically fill in variable names in repetitive blocks of code, or help with debugging)
• I've used it time to time as a search aid (when used properly with a good system it can drastically cut down on complex searches, taking something that would have taken me anywhere from a half hour to 2 hours into something that takes 5-10 minutes)
• Once or twice I've made use of it as a sort of thesaurus to figure out terms when i didn't have enough to search off of (as in, with a normal thesaurus I would give similar words... but I didn't have similar words in these cases)
• As a disability aid for executive dysfunction (see goblin.tools that "magic to-do list" and "compiler" aren't just gimmicks, they're for people with executive dysfunction who struggle breaking down, separating, and sorting tasks)
• I've used it personally as an aid for communication. Being an autistic, when communicating with allistics, especially in a professional environment, it can help edit my message/email to maintain the correct tone as well as make sure I'm getting my point across (again see goblin.tools "Formalizer")
• I've also seen in the wild Amazon's got a great use now where it summarizes user reviews for a product (and this has been practically helpful, I saw some issues with products before buying them there and it gave me cause to look deeper into the reviews to figure out whether that issue mattered to me)

Yes, there are plenty of harmful uses, but if you don't see positive uses you're not looking at all.

There's also the upcoming uses that are still being ironed out but inevitable (as in these aren't just hypotheticals, it's just down to predictable progress):
* Dynamic dialogue in games: tech demos of this have been pretty cool, it's not there to replace writers but to allow NPCs to fluidly talk back to anything rather than purely scripted responses)
* Virtual assistants: you may or may not like them, but many people do like them and being able to handle fluid natural language is a huge step compared to before.

I'm not going to pretend that image generators have much use at the moment, there's technologies that come later that they lead to that can be useful (like dynamic generation of 3d models and environments, which can be good progress towards the goal of "holodecks" in the sense of being able to dynamically call up desired environments then tweaking them to be what you need).

Voice generators right now mostly are just good for nice computer voices and maybe in the future being used to splice in dynamic content (such as player character name) into games (right now games either avoid saying your name entirely, use a stand-in name, and/or have a handful of pre-recorded names that are really cool if they happen to be on the list)

@Lea I think you're quibbling over the term "generative" there, a non-generative version would be outputting just variables rather than raw text. Ie. non-generative analysis is just going to be "x% confident, x% aggressive, x% sympathetic..."

• analyzing prose and flagging tone or phrasing problems = like so many anti-ai people you just assume the person using it is somehow unable to read and understand the text. And frankly as I've already said this is a disability accommodation I'm a little bit pissed off at this response. We can understand these things when pointed out, we can understand whether the text it gives is trash, we're not idiots. What it does is consistently give us text that fixes our tonal issues, and we can recognize those fixes after the fact but can't reasonably do them on our own. So maybe get your head out of your ass when talking about a disability accommodation that someone has first hand experience on and has said so up front.
• summarizing reviews - again, you're just trying to throw away a point because you don't understand what "generative" or "large language model" means.
• coding assistant - and again clearly you made one half-assed attempt to make it do more than it's capable of, considered it trash, and then threw the whole thing away. I've used it plenty, I've used it to speed through refactoring a whole project to change database engines out, I've used it to speed through building UIs with a bunch of buttons. Does it create good code when I just ask it to write a whole application for me? Hell no. But it sure as hell can see me writing a list of buttons and go, "Oh, I recognize the pattern of the names I'm going to fill this in 20 more times with all variables names changed to meet the pattern".