When is AI useful in the real world?
a rule of thumb to use GenAI tools
AI is useful for a real-world task only if the cost for the AI to do the thing and for you to check its work is less than the existing solution.
Milan provides few good and bad examples.
Though it was written in Oct 2020, it seems to be true even now.
As a Hackernews comment said,
don't use it for something that you aren't able to verify or validate
and
the lower quality output comes much faster than you can generate
I've been using GenAI tools for designing this blog, coding an app, editing blog posts, and writing policy documents for IT organization. In each of these cases, GenAI tools (Windsurf or Open WebUI) generates 60 - 70 percent of the output quickly, which I can validate and verify quickly. Then I start to fill-in the rest.
In this process, I've discovered that even though the GenAI models are probabilistic their output is deterministic [1] since they can be validated.