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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   643 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 8, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Has anyone else here not used "non-toy" AI? If so, why aren't you using AI? For me, it just kind of seems "internet-of-shit"-like, both in that it often seems like a gratuitous application of technology and that it seems to combine multiple of the internet's worst problems.

Sure enough, I eventually tried to make an account for Claude, because I thought it might help me procrastinate more effectively. Despite Anthropic giving lip-service to privacy, they not only require a unique phone number per account, but wouldn't accept my VoIP numbers. And I couldn't even get that far in the process, without allowing Google's third-party javascript! Why not just make people go through a dozen recaptchas, if it's actually about spam!? I then decided to see if I could make an OpenAI account, but the page kept giving errors, even with a bunch of third-party javascript allowed.

Has anyone else here not used "non-toy" AI? If so, why aren't you using AI?

Because what would I use it for? None of the common use cases I hear people here put forth for AI are anything I do with any frequency.

It's not about spam. It's that the models they give you access to for free are expensive to run and they throttle you pretty fast. They don't want people creating tons of free accounts to circumvent the limits.

They should say that, rather than claim it's about spam. Also, don't they limit model choice and some proxy for "compute-per-conversation," anyway? What's the multiplier for the utility of n accounts, over 1 account?

Is there a clear quantification of cost/man-hour-replaced? Proton charges $9.99/month for proof-reading and shortening emails, which seems steep for such basic (presumably low-token-per-use) functionality, but they have to make things E2EE and their use-case doesn't really allow limiting per-month usage...

I was about to say that I've never used AI, but then I realized that would be a lie - I've used AI before to put together a long string of fluffy bullshit for work in order to save myself the aggravation of putting together said fluffy bullshit.

...and I will likely use it again this week to, yet again, put together a few paragraphs of fluffy bullshit to appease the MBA types in my office.

I haven’t and I don’t know what I would use it for.

That really depends on what you mean by "non-toy AI".

Do things like AI noise reduction and music stem separation count? I use both regularly. DeepL is very convenient for translating random languages to English.

I don't use LLMs as I have little use for very limited tools that require massaging long prompts that might or might not kinda-sorta do something helpful if I spend a lot of effort at it.

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