I do not trust AI to tell me about history, law, science or other topics where I cannot easily and quickly verify its outputs, as I generally have no idea about its inputs, nor about its parameters for analysis. But I do use it quite a bit to analyze bits of code and help me change and customize stuff.

For instance, I do not really know CSS, HTML, PHP, RegEx, twig, yaml, XML, etc.I'm not even particularly good with the Linux command line. But I can feed some code snippet to an AI, tell it what I want to accomplish, and have it analyze the snippet and give me suggested changes. I can then test the changes and verify the results.

I used this technique to #selfhost my NIP-05 address and avatar so I don't have to rely on a third-party service. Trivial tasks really, but useful for me.

My preferred AI for this type of work is currently perplexity.AI for two reasons:

- I don't have to login if I don't want to

- perplexity links to multiple sources for its reply so I can dig in further if needed

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Discussion

Really, there's this imbalance between what you can achieve and what you can't imo. Analysis and summaries are excellent use cases for AI, but creative tasks like writing code or text is highly dependent on the circumstances, as far as I can tell. Code written by AI is undeniably fragile. BUT: this fragility only matters in certain environments, like systems with medium or higher complexity, where interop matters, with low latency or high load characteristics, basically everywhere, where it can have a compounding effect. I've seen people do great work with AI with configuration languages, that offer a validator. Another excellent use case is asking AI about your code base in self-trained specialist models. We're still at the beginning of discovering, what's feasible to do in our current stage with AI. It's probably going to keep disrupting every part of the economy for years to come, after the hype died down a bit. Most importantly though, it gives people a low qualification entry to many fields, that previously needed huge swaths of time investment. As a specialist, it enables certain work, that required generalist knowledge before. Most importantly, as a worker without training or without good education, it gives you wings, lowering the bar and possible entry point for low skilled work, while rising the ceiling of such.