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?
It has value in natural language processing, like turning unstructured natural language data into structured data. Not suitable for all situations though, like situations that cannot tolerate hallucinations.
Its also good for reorganizing information and presenting it in a different format; and also classification of semantic meaning of text. It’s good for pretty much anything dealing with semantic meaning, really.
I see people often trying to use generative AI as a knowledge store, such as asking an AI assistant factual questions, but this is an invalid usecase.