I can see some minor benefits - I use it for the odd bit of mundane writing and some of the image creation stuff is interesting, and I knew that a lot of people use it for coding etc - but mostly it seems to be about making more cash for corporations and stuffing the internet with bots and fake content. Am I missing something here? Are there any genuine benefits?
AI is a very broad topic. Unless you only want to talk about Large Language Models (like ChatGPT) or AI Image Generators (Midjourney) there are a lot of uses for AI that you seem to not be considering.
It’s great for upscaling old videos: (this would fall under image generating AI since it can be used for colorizing, improving details, and adding in additional frames) so that you end up with something like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ1OgQL9_Cw
It’s useful for scanning an image for text and being able to copy it out (OCR).
It’s excellent if you’re deaf, or sitting in a lobby with a muted live broadcast and want to see what is being said with closed captions (Speech to Text).
Flying your own drone with object detection/avoidance.
There’s a lot more, but basically, it’s great at taking mundane tasks where you’re stuck doing the same (or similar) thing over, and over, and over again, and automating it.
Yeah that’s interesting.
I think most of those are only labelled AI to generate tech hype, though? Like, sure, machine learning and maybe even LLM can and are used for those, but it isn’t a machine given human discernable input and pretending to give human output.
“AI” is the broadest umbrella term for any of these tools. That’s why I pointed out that OP really should be a bit more specific as to what they mean with their question.
AI doesn’t have the same meaning that it had over 10 years ago when we used to use it exclusively for machines that could think for themselves.