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?
I use it for coding, mostly as a time saver. Generally as I’m typing, it will give a suggestion that’s functionally the same as what I was going to type anyway so I hit tab and go to the next line. It’s able to do this accurately for around 80% of the total lines that I’m writing and going from writing full lines to writing 0-3 characters + tab on most of those lines makes a massive speed difference. It’s especially great for writing one off scripts when I’m doing something that’s not even a coding project, but there’s some tedious file juggling involved. Writing a script completely by hand for that often would take slightly longer than just doing the task manually, and as I said, it’s a one-off. But writing the script with copilot often takes as little as 10% of the time which is really nice.
Even in cases where I don’t already know how to solve a problem (particularly a problem involving specific integrations) it can often be faster to ask it how to solve the problem and then look up the specific functions, endpoints, etc it uses in the docs rather than trying to find those doc entries directly with a search. And if it hallucinates a function that doesn’t exist in the docs then I tell it that and it often successfully corrects itself. When it fails more than once I’ve generally found that there’s a high probability that the SDK/API/etc I’m looking at doesn’t have anything that does what I need so it’s time for me to start rethinking my approach
Outside of coding, I also use stable diffusion to generate images of D&D characters I’m creating instead of image searching and settling for something kind of close to what I was picturing.
I also regularly use SD when I stumble upon some art I’d like to use as a desktop wallpaper, but can’t find at high enough resolution. I just upscale it and proceed. Sometimes I’ll have something at the wrong aspect ratio and use generative fill to extend the edges of the image to the desired aspect ratio, those parts of the image are nothing special, but the important part is the original image and I just need some filler to prevent it from abruptly ending before the edges of the screen.
One last case is if I need to put together a tediously long document, I generally find that having it generate a first draft with the right structure and then iterating a bunch on that comes more easily than starting with an empty page.
As a dm I do this too for npcs and sometimes for pcs if they have a specific concept. Otherwise it takes hours of searching and you always have to settle, nothing is quite right. I don’t see an issue with it, no hobby dm can spend money on an artist creating every npc and it’s not feasible to expect it. This way I get high quality art if I’m willing to put the effort in to sorting and correcting images through repainting. Especially since I run a campaign set in feudal Japan. Orcs and kobolds in japanese traditional garb is not very common! Ai even let me run an encounter of a fashion show by providing the players a bank of images to curate a collection from and compete with other collections I made using ai.
I still spend money on patreon for monster tokens and maps and I doubt that would change even if ai could make good ones. I pay for their creativity and concepts not just the art.