What AI tools have you found useful?

AI is great at helping me multitask. For example, with AI, I can generate misinformation and destroy the environment at the same time!

A lot of what we take for granted in software now days was once considered "AI". Every NPC that follows your character in a video game while dynamically accounting for obstacles and terrain features uses the "A* algorithm" which is commonly taught in college courses on "AI". Gmail sorting spam from non-spam (and not really all that well, honestly)? That's "AI". The first version of Google's search algorithm was also "AI".

If you're asking about LLMs, none. Zero. Zip. Nada. Not a goddamned one. LLMs are a scam that need to die in a fire.

I don’t think there’s many consumer use cases for things like LLMs but highly focused, specialized models seem useful. Like protein folding, identifying promising medication, or finding patterns in giant scientific datasets.

I tried Whisper+ voice-to-text this week.

Uses a downloaded 250MB model from Hugging-Face, and processes voice completely offline.

The accuracy is 100% for known words, so far.

For transcribing texts, messages and diary entries.

* I'd be interested to know if it has a large power drain per use.

LLMs can be useful in hyperfocused , contained environments where the models are trained on a specific data set to provide a service for a specific function only. So it won’t be able to answer random questions you throw at it, but it can be helpful on the only thing it’s trained to do.

The only AI tool I've found actually useful and reliable is AI denoise for photo editing.

"AI" as in the hyped and since 5 years mainstream "Generative AI": Jetbrains' locally run code line completion. Sometimes faster than writing, if you have enough context.

Machine learning stuff that existed well before, but there was exactly 0 hype: Image tagging/face detection.

Copilot in VScode is something you'd have to tear out of my cold, dead hands. Pressing Tab to auto complete is so useful. I use the GPT 4.1 model or whatever it is called. I tried Gemini but for some reason it's complete ass when doing code. Android Studio Gemini is worse than the free tier on the website.

However, I've found the Gemini Pro model on the website is incredibly good for information assistance. To give an idea of my current uses, I have two chats pinned on it: fact checking and programming advice. I use the former for general research that would take more than a few minutes of Googling but need an answer now, and the latter for brainstorming code design or technical tutorials (recently had it help me set up a VM in WSL).

One tool I wish I could use is ElevenLabs. Had a friend on the free tier of it make some really cool and convincing voice lines (I forgot what character it was) a long time ago. Looks easy to use too. I can't justify spending money just to play with it but if I had a purpose for it, I would.

I used GPT to help me plan a 2 week long road trip with my family. It was pretty fucking awesome at finding cool places to stop and activities for my kids to do.

It definitely made some stupid ass suggestions that would have routed us far off our course, or suggested stopping at places 15 minutes into our trip, but sifting through the slop was still a lot quicker than doing all of the research myself.

I also use GPT to make birthday cards. Have it generate an image of some kind of inside joke etc. I used to do these by hand, and this makes it way quicker.

I also use it at work for sending out communications and stuff. It can take the information I have and format it and professionalize it really quick.

I also use it for Powershell scripting here and there, but it does some really wacky stuff sometimes that I have to go in and fix. Or it halucinates entire modules that don't exist and when I point it out it's like "good catch! That doesn't exist!" and it always gives me a little chuckle. My rule with AI and Powershell is that I don't ask it to do things that I don't already know how to do. I like to learn things and be good at my job, but I don't mind using GPT to help with some of the busy work.

https://notebooklm.google.com/ is really handy for various things, you can throw a bunch of documents into it and then ask questions and chat interactively about their contents. I've got a notebook for a roleplaying campaign I'm running where I've thrown the various sourcebook PDFs, as well as the "setting bible" for my homebrew campaign, and even transcripts of the actual sessions. I can ask it what happened in previous episodes that I might have forgotten, or to come up with stats for whatever monster I might need off the cuff, or questions about how the rules work.

Copilot has been a fantastic programming buddy. For those going a little more in depth who don't want to spring for a full blown GitHub Copilot subscription and Visual Studio integration, there's https://voideditor.com/ - I've hooked it up to the free Gemini APIs and it works great, though it runs out of tokens pretty quickly if you use it heavily.

DeepL for translation. It’s not perfect but it feels so much better than those associated w/ search engines.

None

I use ChatGPT every single day, and I find it both extremely useful and entertaining.

I mainly use it to help edit longer messages, bounce ideas around, and share random thoughts I know my friends wouldn’t be interested in. Honestly, it also has pretty much replaced Google for me.

I basically think of it as a friend who’s really knowledgeable across a wide range of topics, excellent at writing, and far more civil than most people I run into online - but who’s also a bit delusional at times and occasionally talks out of their ass, which is why I can’t ever fully trust it. That said, it’s still a great first stop when I’m trying to solve a problem.

https://goblin.tools/

Uh, kinda, maybe? Most use cases are things that I don't really see the use of, or have found to produce more flawed results than previous ways of doing things.

However, a couple years ago, someone on reddit said their perfect use case was using AI to hunt down things you enjoyed but have forgotten the titles of - books, movies, tv series, songs, videogames, etc.

Well, I have a few of those half-forgotten items, where I've remembered snippets of things but have no idea what they actually were called. I've tried looking them up over the years with regular search engines, with no luck. And a few times in the past couple years, I've used random AI engines to try to track these titles down.

And the thing is, AI absolutely has not been able to tell me what the titles to anything was. However, in trying to come up with more details to pass to AI, I've accidentally found other webpages that helped me find what I was looking for. Like, one of the things I was looking for was a horribly bad 1970's tv movie and, in my latest search for the title, on like page 8 of my google/duckduckgo results trying to find something to feed the AI from what little I remembered, I ran across a website that lists the cast and plot of, like, every tv movie. Not just top ten, or people that became big stars later, or horror movies or whatever, but every movie from like the 50s /60s on. And I sat on that website and read through the high-level plotline of every tv movie from, like 1968 on, and eventually found the movie.

There was a book where I remembered the first name of the main character and a very specific scene, even some of the exact words, and the three AI engines I tried couldn't tell me anything. But in searching for more details (and I had tried serving for it before), I eventually ran across a book site that helped me out. Interesting thing: when I passed direct quotes to AI, they couldn't tell me, when I asked what books had that plot, they couldn't tell me, but if I asked if a specific scene happened in the book, they said it was there.

I have one game that I'm still searching for, but AI engines have inadvertently helped me find most of the rest of my wishlist.

I run LLMs locally for scripting, ADD brainstorming/organization, automation, pseudo editors and all sorts of stuff, as they’re crazy good for the size now.

I think my favorites are Nemotron 49B (for STEM), Qwen3 finetunes (for code), some esoteric 2.5 finetunes (for writing), and Jamba 52B (for analysis, RAG, chat, long context, this one is very underrated). They all fit in 24GB. And before anyone asks, I know they’re unreliable, yes. But they are self hosted and tools that work for me.

I could run GLM 4.5 offloaded with a bit more RAM…

I've found LLMs in general helpful for coding specifically when I have to use tools or languages that I only have a passing familiarity with.

In my life I've used Gemini for some fitness coaching alongside other sources of information and it has been quite helpful and motivating.

Those that I find the most useful are those that I (and likely many others) tend to take for granted.

For example, fuzzy logic may very well be used in electronics that involve temperature control - fridge, aircon, rice cooker, water heater - under the hood.

Another one is CSP (constraint-satisfaction problems) solvers which tend to be used in scheduling softwares. A possible use case is public transportation.

There are probably lots more AIs working behind the scenes that benefit everyone, but don't get the coverage because they are just boring tech now. People may not even consider them AI!

I appreciate these AI for making my life so convenient.

LLMs are pretty good for language learning. I often ask ChatGPT to converse with me in Japanese or help me make a sentence sound more natural.

The only thing that comes to mind is I wanted to make a shell script that moved every file in a directory to another directory, but one at a time, slowly, and I didn't want to learn sh from scratch, so I asked an LLM for a script that would do it.

The script didn't work, but I was able to figure out how to fix it better than write it from scratch.

I felt bad for the environment I was destroying, and I would never pay for this shit.

The one that the other department tried, and which failed to meet expectations dramatically. Gave management a healthy dose of reality on "AI".

Honestly I'm part of the problem a little bit.

In my hobby project I used GitHub copilot, to help me ramp up on unfamiliar tech. I was integrating three unfamiliar platforms in an unfamiliar program language, and it helped expose the APIs and language features I didn't know about. It was almost like a tutorial; it'd make some code that was kinda broken, but fixing it would introduce me to new language features and API resources that would help me. Which was nice because I struggle to just read API specs.

I've also used it when on my d&d campaign to create images of new settings. It just a 3 player weekly game so it's hard to justify paying an artist for a rush job. Not great, I know. I hope the furry community has more backbone than I do, because they're singlehandedly keeping the illustration industry afloat at this point.

I use it to create funny shitpost copypasta-like outputs that I send to my friends in our personal group chats. Otherwise it's fucking useless.

I know the reputation that AI has on Lemmy, however I've found that some users (like myself) have found that LLMs can be useful tools

I know the reputation that AI has on Lemmy, however I've found that some users (like myself) have found that LLMs can be useful tools.

Their utility is not questioned. It's their true cost and how they're developed that's the issue.

No doubt a machine able to do some quick and dirty jobs that would take us a lot more time is a fine tool (like mentioned already, denoise, quick text summaries and stuff like that) edit: even complex and highly skilled stuff. The tool is already impressive today, and I don't doubt it will get much better quickly.

The issue is how it learned to do what it can do and how it is monoetized. I mean, learning from humanity common knowledge (no AI at all without it being allowed to learn from us all) and making it... subscription-based for us to use? WTF? The issue is also how it is destroying many things in the exclusive profit of a handful of very rich people and their shareholders. The issue is how we, mankind, have zero control over a tool that is threatening to make a lot of us go bankrupt...

Feel free to downvote, obviously.

And to answer your question:

What AI tools have you found useful?

I would say, the off button... of which there is none I can find.

I use predictive AI for certain classification tasks daily at work, however I call that Deep Learning and not AI. I don't want to be too specific, but you can imagine we are classifying certain objects - is this a traffic light, is this a tree etc. It is a task that cannot be solved geometrically very good, so Deep Learning is the perfect use case there.

I know people dislike and complain about it, but I absolutely love Suno. LOVE IT. I’ve created what I think are some really cool songs. Will they ever be hits on the radio? Nope. Will anyone else listen to them besides me? Probably not. But boy, after tweaking, I’d rather listen to some of the songs I’ve created than the garbage on the radio!

My CRM system at work has what called "Genius AI" integrated into it. When customer service reps receive calls that require site visits the AI auto fills the work ticket using the phone conversation adds in contact name and numbers and even puts a brief description of what service they require. The AI also transcribes our calls into text to be able to refer back to or get caught up on a job when someone is out sick. It wasnt Iife changing it wasnt forced but as a simple aid it makes life a bit easier.

Supermaven code autocomplete in vscode is really nice

GPT to write emails

I like it for coming up with quick, modular code that produces whatever direct result I want without having to reivent the wheel provided I more or less understand how it works and how to tweak it to refine what I want or how it does it

I'm running ollama and open-webui and some unsloth modified models for some general purpose stuff.

The https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507-GGUF model has been pretty good. Beware it's a Chinese model so you can get some funny results if you ask about Tiananmen Square or if certain people resemble Winnie the Pooh. For making Linux configurations it works great.

Some gemma3 models are okay but it doesn't seem as good. Same for Phi4 models.

I've been self-hosting my own AI stuff for a bit using Ollama. I use it to create images, design a tattoo, run a chatbot, write emails, write code and commit-messages, run a D&D game, explain concepts that I'm not familiar with, translate languages, etc.

I've been toying with different models, and I'm not sure that I have one that I would say is a goto. I am liking Ollama to be able to easily pull in and test new LLMs, as well as Stable-Diffusion for image generation/modification.

I think I’ve found the one area where LLMs really excel: business books / self help literature. The real life examples in that genre are pretty awful and dragged out as it is, so you can’t really make it much worse, now can you? The information density is kept low to fluff up the page count, and oh boy, are LLMs good at that. So, if you want to become a self help guru, but can’t be bothered to write your own book about magical hotels, marriage advice, productivity tips and communication, LLMs can take care of that for you. Copilot has turned out to work well for projects like that.

If you raise the bar, you’re going to have to read and edit the text manually. You also need to keep track of what has already been mentioned elsewhere and avoid repeating them again, depending on the genre. In business books though, that’s not a problem at all.

BTW, if you wonder about the downvotes, it’s because Asklemmy@lemmy.world isn’t a safe space for AI related discussions. Consider posting somewhere else.

I was testing a lot of tools for work (UX), but they all sucked. Basically I just use gpt, cursor for tab coding,l and image generation for various purposes (Leonardo).

Most apps work poorly and using a model directly works better.

I worked on a few apps that use ai without a chat bot, but we found users expected one, maybe that will change in the future.

The only time I've seen real use from an ai tool is at work, we are using it to get data from an invoice/quote/etc from the pdf that we get emailed to data that we can put in the database. It's not a perfect solution, but there isn't really anything else we can find other than getting people to do it, which is slower and more expensive.

I’ve enjoyed messing with Perplexity and Duck AI.

If we are talking chatbots I see them as another level of abstraction to search and is useful but I have concerns on the energy use. Other uses I have encountered is just sorta a convenience thing. Where it can do a bunch of things that individual software can do but at a one stop shop. I have not directly been involved in other aspects but im aware how they are baked into things like facial recognition and tracking and such.

For some situations I used Copilot to script an auto-translator for XML-EPG in bash.

For that it worked okay enough.

I chat with llm's to help me remember shit I already know, or to change the tone of stuff I write but thats about it.

I mostly use it to generate smut for gooning. It's useful for that. Chat gpt is absolutely filthy if you get it going the right way.