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’s pretty good at looking up readily available knowledge that doesn’t have a lot of nuance to it. There’s a lot of stuff you can look up but it always comes with a grain of salt.
Home remedies, bunch of baby facts like poop color meaning, recipes and adjustments, programming examples (requires very prompting skills).
Rewriting stuff into business English is another very nice use case. Tell the AI your qualitifations, ask to make a cover letter for “job description” then review. Drafting text and summarising also pretty good.
Adding modifiers to questions like “list of 20 for X” for a brainstorming or “include how scientifically reliable the claim is on scale of 1-10” really help with getting a good answer and some nuance to whatever claims.
It’s touted as the be all end all but in reality the use cases are very specific in my experience.