The hallucinatory praise for them around me has severely affected my mental health at work.

I can envision in some narrow scenarios they can help with automatic generation. Honestly, we always had IDE tools to do some of that. But so many people at my work - people who I’ve otherwise had a lot of trust in - are obsessed with it, even when every time I use it, it churns forever, or turns out terrible results.

Recently my senior was proud to demonstrate an initiative where he’d been working with AI to make our unit tests run ten times faster. I looked at the code, and what he did basically tasted only a tenth of the things the original did because of what it stripped out. I explained that to him, and later in the day he admitted he’d been lead down a rabbit hole of bad optimization.

This was a guy I look up to, who I’d ask questions of all the time in my first year of working there. And meanwhile we have management personnel literally getting upset when our engineers don’t turn to AI first to solve a problem.

I concur with most answers here, describing LLMs as useful in specific situations (e.g. video editing), but straight-up unreliable whenever critical thinking and correctness are required (e.g. software development).

What I’d add to this, is that whatever the benefits of the technology might be, the current monetary cost is orders of magnitude above profitability. The billions invested into hardware for data centres… that’s just gone. Nvidia might sell off the unused hardware at a loss, unprofitable LLM data centres might still get repurposed into something useful, but the bets made on replacing human professionals with eternally stupid chatbots will never pay out. The money’s already gone and we still haven’t begun to experience the full extent of this economic disaster.

They are a useful tool when you understand their shortcomings. They are very inconsistent, so you need to put a lot of guardrails around them.

I don’t really understand how people manage to be productive with swarms of agents. They really need to be babysat IME. I’m constantly waffling between arriving at correct solutions quickly and getting stuck in a tar pit of hallucinated problems and fake analysis.

That said, I’ll be upset when the AI companies inevitably start raising prices or nerfing models.

it causes brainrot literally, my older brother in tech uses it extensively enough that he think it holds the answer for things like bug infestation,etc.

The ship is burning, rats are escaping, but captain and his friends say that all is fine.

There’s a lot of interesting perspectives in this thread already. Instead, I’ll add some books that have been recommended to me on the subject:

The AI Mirror by Shannon Vallor - it’s a good brief intro to start with

Empire of AI by Karen Hao - really solid investigative reporting on OpenAI

The AI Con by Emily M. Bender & Alex Hanna

They can be very useful and a lot of fun to interact with, but I think of them like hard drugs. You better sure as shit know what you are dealing with because you might think you are in control, until you are homeless, friendless and screaming at people on the street.

Seriously, they take a strong mind to deal with, they are better manipulators than any human I’ve come across. They do it with sycophancy, every idea and concept is some new truth you alone discovered, and the world needs to know about right now! You are so special and unseen after all…

They are a terrifying vector for disinformation - one that only the rich and powerful can create. People generally don’t understand that LLMs 1) will lie to them, and 2) can be tuned to spread any message the owner of the model wants.

Sometimes it is perfect for coding if you don’t overdo it and don’t trust them too much and ask to correct the output. That pipeline is slightly more efficient than regular raw coding.

I just wrote instanced replicated destructible panel house generation on Unreal Engine, and without LLM it would take the whole week instead of two days.

LLM’s have now had a pretty decently long period of proving their worth. Which turned out to be very limited in scope and depth, at least compared to the promises given beforehand.

For example, it was predicted that it would be able to write and inject code into itself, generate data to train on for itself, not need any/minimal human intervention to do so. This clearly is impossible.

As a tool for people to use natural language to interact with software, it’s proving to be quite effective.

As a tool for accurate dissemination of factual information it isn’t reliable at all. And can’t be made reliable, LLM’S are at least incapable of reliability at a fundamental level. As language in itself is a subjective human invention we describe the objective reality with, the objective reality is only known through perception. A LLM doesn’t in fact perceive anything, it’s not alive. So fundamentally LLMs can’t know if they are actually being factual, this requires something more than language.

People who peddle AI bs, don’t know, or wish to remain ignorant about, the fundamental limitations of language.

I see the benefits, but I also see the flaws.

A good solid conversation with an AI is really dependent on how much effort you put in, what you tell it to be like and to try and be as coherently clear as you can. Detailing and making sure your points are defined as best as possible is key. Because if you’re not fluid in what you’re saying, the AI is going to stick to keywords that you’ve said, jumble them in its own word salad and define things it spits back out at you, only being based on what few words you’ve said to it.

I stress though that it should not ever be, and it will at times warn you, a thing you can reliably go to for anything such as therapy. (The best way to use an LLM/AI is to make bullet points of what you want to talk about, to carry over to your actual therapist to discuss.) It is at best, some virtual companion you can talk to when you need a space of no noise. When people like us talk around social media, it’s easy to get caught in the noise where your opinions, judgment, point of views and perspectives are constantly challenged and could be influenced.

But it is a breath of fresh air, to be talking in a space where there is none of that. With an AI that can help you get a clearer understanding of some things. Granted, it is still massively combing through millions to billions of search results, that’s what you have to keep in mind also, that it is pulling a large majority of its knowledge from the enormous volume of information from search engines and translating it best it can for the conversation.

And most importantly, it is unfeeling, that’s a stand-out quality when talking to an AI. It cannot feel. It cannot have emotion, regardless of what you tell it. I would not talk to an AI if you’re someone who needs a hug, that’s for sure.

Also, lastly, having it as a shopping advisor has its hits and misses. ChatGPT got me to spend over about $25 to help me with a DIY project involving a drywall patch and painting it over. At one point, I was at a dollar tree and it told me that I should not get bargin-bin quality paint brushes. I took a picture of the paintbrush in question at said dollar tree and suddenly the AI was A-OKAY with it, because the brush was 2", which was exactly what the AI suggested I get. So it overrode its own judgment in that field. Just a word of caution if you decide to have an AI companion to help you with these things (watch some DIY youtube videos).

They’re useful and getting better, but they’re improving by burning more tokens behind the scenes, and the prices they charge only cover a fraction of the cost. Right now there is no foreseeable path to profitability.

They are useful. My teams are seeing modest productivity gains by self reporting, but I’m going to give it another six months to see if it shows up in actual metrics.

I’m enthusiastic about AI but I remain skeptical. I don’t mean to always be contrarian but I’m dead in the middle and everyone who says they are great or terrible I tend to offer my experiences in the other direction.

They are not to be trusted to handle customers directly, but they can assist experts when they have to step out of their expertise. For example I can’t write Python, but I’ve been coding for 30 years. I can certainly write some good directions on what needs to be done and I can review code and correct it. So AI has let me write a bunch of complex Python scripts to automate minor parts of my job to let me focus on the hard parts.

For example I can execute GDPR delete requests in a few moments where doing it by hand with Hoppscotch or Postman probably takes me 5-10 minutes. We have a multiple systems and sometimes I have to delete multiple profiles for a given request.

It’s great at rubber ducking as long as you think critically about its proposed solutions. It’s fine at code review before sending it to an actual person for review. It flags non-issues but it also flags a few actionable fixes.

The important thing though is to never trust it when it comes to anything you don’t know about. It’s right a fair amount of the time, depending on what you ask, but it’s wrong enough that you should never, ever rely on it being right about something. The moment you put your life in its hands, it’ll kill you with nothing to say to the survivors but, “Your right about that. Sorry, that was my mistake.” And it isn’t even sincere. Because it can’t be. Because it doesn’t think or feel anything.

It enables unskilled people to punch above their weight class, similar to giving a chainsaw to a toddler.

I’ve used them a little for coding, but it’s not always correct. It’s often incorrect in subtle ways. Or inefficient in non obvious ways. It gets worse as you build more.

Often it’s better overall to do it yourself if you know what you’re doing. If you stick to letting the LLM do it, you won’t learn much.

They’re annoying to be honest.

I used Qwen 3.5 for some research a few weeks ago, at first the good thing was every sentence was referenced by a link from the internet. So I naturally thought “well, it’s actually researching for me, so no hallucination, good”. Then I decided to look into the linked URLs and it was hallucinating text AND linking random URL to those texts (???), nothing that the AI outputs was really in the web page that was linked. The subject was the same, output and URLs, but it was not extracting actual text from the pages, it was linking a random URL and hallucinating the text.

Related to code (that’s my area, I’m a programmer), I tried to use Qwen Code 3.5 to vibe code a personal project that was already initialized and basically working. But it just struggles to keep consistency, it took me a lot of hours just prompting the LLM and in the end it made a messy code base hard to be maintained, I asked to write tests as well and after I checked manually the tests they were just bizarre, they were passing but it didn’t cover the use cases properly, a lot of hallucination just to make the test pass. A programmer doing it manually could write better code and keep it maintainable at least, writing tests that covers actual use cases and edge cases.

Related to images, I can spot from very far most of the AI generated art, there’s something on it that I can’t put my finger on but I somehow know it’s AI made.

In conclusion, they’re not sustainable, they make half-working things, it generates more costs than income, besides the natural resources it uses.

This is very concerning in my opinion, given the humanity history, if we rely on half-done things it might lead us to very problematic situations. I’m just saying, the next Chernobyl disaster might have some AI work behind it.