Do you use LLMs? And some podcast recommendations

Right now, I am using LLMs to (a few examples):

• Translation
• Given the transcript and/or script of an episode of my podcasts, generate a summary (show notes) for the episode
• Generate fluffy or bureaucratic text, filler text, based on a few main points
• Give me the main points of a text—but from a text I don’t need to read. This is not a replacement for a full reading. If the LLM didn’t exist, I simply wouldn’t read it.
• Ask questions in the classroom (I am a professor) just to see a summary of a topic and, perhaps, find some information I had forgotten—or, even better, a hallucination.
• Manipulations with copied texts from web pages. For example, suppose I copy something from the internet, and it comes with a lot of clutter. I ask the LLM to remove the clutter.
• Transcribe text from images to use as ALT on Bluesky. I mostly use Mistral Le Chat for this.
• Generate programming exercises.

And more...

I am NOT using them to:

• generate images (unless as a capability test)
• write blog posts for me (I did it a few times and the results were not great)

Podcast Suggestions

If you're using LLMs, I recommend listening to the following podcasts:

• Better Offline, by Ed Zitron
• System Crash, by Paris Marx and Brian Merchant

I've listened to a few episodes of both, and they're excellent.

I know there's another related podcast, but I haven't listened to any of its episodes yet:

• Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000

One of its hosts is Emily M. Bender, the first author of the well-known paper:

• On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜

Feedback

And you? What are you using LLMs for? What are you not using them for?