I use GitHub / Microsoft Co-Pilot as integrated into my editor phpStorm. I consider it useful for autocomplete. Like "autocomplete" on my phone, it often gets things wrong. But it is net useful. I wrote about this a bit in 2023: “AI” is Not That
I do not use any generative AI tools—for either text (Large Language Models) or imagery (Transformers). I find the arguments against them compelling inasmuch as they constitute theft of human labor, copyright, and lack what I would call broadly “human soulfulness.” They also have environmental impact by their very nature of navigating a bunch of text over and over and over to see what the most probable response ought to be. As an artist I find most of such output induces a Sartrean nausea in me. It's also rather alarming that there's a page on Wikipedia called Deaths linked to chatbots which seems like only the beginning. If actually everything is healthcare then chatbots are not good at it.
Most of the tools I've seen do not impress me more than Eliza or toys made with Markov chains, such as my own Blogging Bot in 2018.
I am a strong believer in IndieWeb principles. LLMs have created harm on the web in recent years, which I and others have documented on the large language model traffic page on the IndieWeb wiki.
I am intrigued by the usage of “AI” to interrogate and summarize very large data sets, in particular to attempt oversight on powerful institutions such as governments and large corporations.
I think there's some promise for “AI” in accessibility. See AI and Accessibility: the Good, the Bad, and the Bollocks by Léonie Watson.
In the 20th century there were a few prefixes that meant "the future." The "Radio Flyer" neither flies nor is or uses radio. But "radio" meant the future when the little red wagon was named. I think we use the term “AI” identically.
No good ever came from misunderstanding what a thing actually is and does.
- Joe Crawford