Deepl Write is a perfect language learning tool as it corrects everything you write. I made so much progress in German with that tool.
While you might say that this has eliminated work for illustrators (and in many cases it absolutely has), I'm just a regular guy on a budget – meaning that I wouldn't have hired those illustrators in the first place because I couldn't afford to spend $10k creating 500 images. So this project only exists because of image-generating generative AI tools.
But nevermind, since you asked about "useful" — I've as an initial skeptic and avoider nonetheless lately been thoroughly impressed with what the codeium.com/live chatbot achieves for my on-the-fly dev questions (what does X do, how to do Y, what's the prob with this Z, etc) on a certain underdocumented underblogged and under-StackOverflowed niche lang I've been just getting into. Really good to avoid flooding the actual user community itself with an endless wall of n00b Qs. Seems like actual repo grokkage is baked into it or close-enough-anyway-most-of-the-time. Hallucinations occur but seldomly and for dev stuff, anyway trivial to immediately detect or else swiftly falsify/verify. Sometimes saying "no that's not it", and another answer is proposed.
Old news here I guess, but took me a while to find a need for that sort of thing =)
The money flowing into the market has allowed for a lot of fuzzy data analytics to be "automated" and cross checked by people. Satellite image processing is a huge market that leverages this. We're not counting cargo container turnover in ports by hand, or with basic tools any more.
The LLM side yes. There are tons of marketing and content farms that are making heavy use of these tools. This was already a bottom of the barrel market and the decrease in price + increase in volume has been a win for those who embraced the tech... there are fewer people working making a bit more money.
There is a LOT of nonsense out there that is NOT delivering. Flooz and Beenz...
I wrote a cloud detection algorithm that would run well on a 20MHz microcontroller powered by 4 AA batteries. But my bosses were worried they couldn't find devs to replace me if I retired, and figured a CS intern and a trained dog [*] could train a CNN to do the same thing. $600k and 2 years later they got something that worked until the dog got a better job and the intern returned to school. None of the surviving engineers could make heads or tails of the solution so they hired a PhD to replicate the work. After publishing his research paper he left and found a job at an east coast university.
So... Sure... CNNs are doing all sorts of things, mostly things we did with DFTs in the past and not quite as well.
* the joke here is the dog does the technical tasks while the intern's only responsibilities are to feed and walk the dog and give it a treat when it completes it's user stories before the end of the sprint.*
However, last I checked, the second most used AI tool after ChatGPT is Character.ai. Many of the others are writing aids, Midjourney, and the free tools around these.
r/LocalLLaMA is one of the largest communities on Reddit.
AI to assist writing is useful. AI to summarize long paragraphs is useful.
I consider the posing of the question a reasonable first approximation to "the emperor has no clothes". I would like to see a couple of blue chips, who make significant outcome in real world goods and services from this input source. Or a finance house or investment bank who decides to sack their quants. If they just supplement the quants with chips, then I think the claim the chips add value is open to doubt.