AI & stuff
Thoughts
Opinions on AI are splitted. I mean it's good that we have the technology, but I think it's getting out of hand and mostly wrong used.
On the social site it's just used to create images and videos. It's sometimes funny to see, but there is so much crap. Some are just made to spread false information or other false stuff. I mean really, the deepfake stuff or AI Voice stuff to sound like some Voiceactor is not a good way. It destroys jobs and trust, it looks kinda easy to steal someones voice and being replaced by AI voice then.
AI image and video generation destroys also jobs, but also kinda helps people who can't create stuff and don't have money or can't describe stuff to an artist. I kinda wouldn't use AI images or videos over real created stuff. Using it in placeholders to see what if, I guess helps alot, but in the endproduct it should be realmade by an artist and not AI.
How I use it
The usage of AI on searching stuff is great. I sometimes use it when I really can't find stuff on my own. I had to use AI to help me getting stuff for ffmpeg. Cause I wanted to resize a 16:9 video to a 9:16 ish YouTube Short video. The video should be downsized to fit in and the top and lower part should be the video burred.
I searched for 6 hours+ to just resize the video and it wasn't even really that what I want and the parameters for ffmpeg were messed up. So I tested AI to help me find the parameters I need. I asked for parameters to resize and parameters to make a video blurry, after that I ask how I can overlay 2 videos. In the end I end up with a CMD script to just drag and drop my mp4 file onto to process it through ffmpeg.
So I mostly use it when I can't find the answer on the net after I spend a few hours. I tried to get more familiar with the problem, tried alot of stuff and get still things done even they are completely messy.
What I've tested
I have huge problems to imagine stuff, huge problems to describe stuff to artists what I want, so I tried AI image generation with Stability Matrix. So I tested alot to just what if and stuff. I learned alot of prompting and workflow building with Comfy UI. How the latent image size is influencing the image generation. Kinda a fun experiment.
A sencond thing what I tested in python was gathering information from a text. It wasn't that useful yet. Having a few issues with city names especially when it comes to names with "ä,ö,ü,ß".
I know I had issues with image generation on my MacBook Air, my laptop with AMD grafics but not with my main computer with my RTX 4070 ti super. I don't know if it's better to run the text thingie there to, maybe it'll make a change, maybe not. I should try it in the future.
What I had planned to build
So 2 weeks before the RAM meltdown I thought of building an AI test pc for my homelab. The specs were I guess kinda lowend but lowend overkill. I would have used an I 5 or a Ryzen 5 or 7 with 64gb RAM, 2 tb SATA SSD, 1 tb NVME SSD and 2 RTX 5060 TI 16 gb cards. It's not as performant but the huge amount of VRAM would have been great. The total cost of this would have been less than 1800€, which is acceptabel.
Even more thoughts
More and more people are using AI, many not correctly, but for everything is potential. I still wont use complete code out of AI, I would still only use it after a long research and just helping me with single functions or even just a part of a function. Cause if we forget to think and forget how good things can be if we understand how things are done and how things can be altered without asking AI all the time, we are actually getting dumber and loose the ability to think and we loose the ability to differ from good to bad. It's fine people using AI I suppose, but please learn from it and learn for yourself and not just get the answers from it. Sometimes it just satisfy the request but doesn't answer correctly. So you might have to double check everything. I've read about some companies which are using AI to analyse their sales and stuff. The AI messed up and just told them it's all good, while a worker double checked and all things were bad. Might be wrong training of AI, but you have a Database where u have all things in it, why not try to analyse it with SQL and build a script. Well I'm not a sales person nor a manager nor someone who understands that part. But not all things can be done just with AI.
We just need to not forget how to think...
So all in all I will keep searching online for infos for what I need and maybe check what AI says to it if I'm unable to find something useful. In the end I keep writing stuff for myself, test things, modify and do all stuff. It's better for my mind, to keep me focused on stuff and not to move things to AI and wonder why nothing works, because in the end you are the bug fixer and not the AI.