This is a short post summarising my principles about the use of genAI tools, and my concrete usage patterns. I use the word “genAI” here on purpose, to distinguish the current invasive crop of LLM based “AI” from long established machine learning and game dev concepts.
Principles
When I create something, I create it. I don’t use genAI for doing the work for me.
Purely assistive use of AI is something I consider if needed (see below for the details on that), but that is rare.
I avoid cloud based genAI offerings for privacy reasons, and in general I consider the heavy use of genAI I see all around me a very problematic development, not only for the obvious reasons (energy use, ethics, licencing, supporting billionaires & their market manipulation, giving away the means of production, …), but also because there seem to be more and more studies that show a cognitive impact on users.
My genAI use in practice
I use AI only sparingly to help with mild aphasia situations or translation, or to get a start into researching a certain topic I lack the right classic search terms for.
If I’m writing or chatting and can’t remember the word I want to use, and all attempts to find it on my own (or with the help of another human, if there’s one I can ask) fail, I will turn to a locally installed LLM and describe the word or concept I’m looking for. For that particular use case, the stochastic nature of an LLM turns out to be actually a nice fit.
If I can’t remember (or don’t know) a word in English but in German or vice versa, I might run it through DeepL to get a fitting translation. Likewise when I need to translate something from a language I don’t speak myself (or don’t trust myself to speak well enough), to get the basic gist of it.
When I’m researching something that I have absolutely no clue about, I sometimes utilize genAI as a kind of search term seed, to give me enough basic understanding of the concept to then use a classic internet search to find further information on it with the right keywords.
In the past I’ve also utilised genAI as spicy auto complete, letting it finish my sentences while writing longer blog posts if I felt like the suggested phrasing matched my own style and was something I would have come up with as well. I have stopped doing that and to be honest am not proud of ever having done that, even though it saved me a ton of key strokes.