I have never once found an “AI” feature integrated by a corporation useful.
I have only ever found “AI” useful when it’s unobtrusive, and something I chose to use manually. Sometimes an LLM is useful to use, but I don’t need it shilled to me inside a search bar or in a support chat that won’t solve my problem until I bypass the LLM.
I have occasionally found the Google search AI handy in pointing me in the right direction, like when I can’t remember or don’t know a particular term for something, it’s decent at giving me the term I’m actually searching for. Can’t trust it for shit as it’s intended to be used though.
I find customer support service Chatbots useful, they tend to ask the right questions before connecting me to an actual human, so I don’t have to explain myself over and over. They also categorize your problem so you won’t be forwarded 3 times till you finally reach the right department. They’re essentially like the “press 1 to…, press 2 to…” shtick during a service call, except the customer support person has access to your chat history.
I find those kinds of chatbots useful, but those aren’t the ones I encounter 90% of the time. Most of the time, it’s a chatbot that summarizes the help articles I just read, giving faulty interpretations of the source material, that then goes on to never direct me to a real person unless I tell it multiple times that the articles it’s paraphrasing aren’t helping. (and sometimes, they have no live support at all, and only an LLM + support articles)
I primarily end up using LLMs through DuckDuckGo’s private frontend alongside a search, so if my current search doesn’t yield the correct answer to my question (i.e. I ask for something but those keywords only ever turn up search results on a different, but similar topic) then I go to the LLM and ask a more refined question, that otherwise doesn’t produce any relevant results in a traditional keyword search.
I also use integrated LLMs to format and distill my offhand notes, (and reformat arbitrary text based on specific criteria repeatedly for structured notes,) learn programming syntax more at my own pace and in my own way, and just generally get answers on more well-known topics a lot faster than I would scrolling past 5 pages of SEO-“optimized” garbage just designed to fill time for the ads to load before actually giving me a good answer.
