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?
If you don’t know what you are doing and ask LLMs for code then you are gonna waste time debugging it without understanding but if you are just asking it for boiler plate stuff, or are asking it to add comments and print outs to console for existing code for debugging, it’s really great for that. Sometimes it needs chastising or corrections but so do humans.
I find it very useful but not worth the environmental cost or even the monetary cost. With how enshittified Google has become now though I find that ChatGPT has become a necessary evil to find reliable answers to simple queries.