Writing

If we were to close our eyes and pretend that the conversation around AI hadn't happened the way it did, and the training had only involved things people generally agreed were fair game, one could imagine a world where we largely used them as "that person who can tell you what to search for" or clarifies your understanding.

It's not intelligent in the way anyone means, but it's theoretically capable of being a better interface for a search engine.

Edit: it's whole thing is language manipulation. I forgot that I've written technical documents and had it summarize or explain them back to me. Anything it gets wrong is something I can bet a lazy or rushed human would also get caught by, so I clarify that point. Not proofreading, since I'm not asking for feedback. Just "did the words convey the information well enough for a statistical model to properly contextualize".

No.

What about an art contest for AI generated graphics

If you ignore the environmental impacts and how you're making rich assholes even richer, it could maybe be used for editing advice (with a huge grain of salt for hallucinations, but it could sometimes point out something you hadn't noticed).

But you should not ignore the environmental and economic impacts. Instead, you should become a better writer and find human pre-readers.

(Oh yeah, and it's not strictly an ethical concern, but if you use it for editing, you need to be concerned about sending it your in-progress work, as they will likely be stealing everything you send to use as training material and launder into their own 'original' work.)

Post-apocalypse with a system that got saved over in a lead lined locker.

Alan Moore's From Hell would probably need another two books just for him to talk about his research and the references he makes and it's just a comic book... bad readers can hardly be good writers.

I guess it would be fair to ask LLMs to start your journey, like "main works on this genre/theme", and from these works you pull the thread for more things

Well, the ethical side of things is more about how LLMs were made, rather than what they do. However, you would also need to disclose what use you made of even the most ethically built LLM.

That being said, the specific use case you're positing is bullshit. You can't ai away research. Worse, it is likely to backfire because GIGO.

What you're describing is just a fancy search engine, and you can't trust any of the ai driven ones to give good information reliably. Hell, it's hard enough to use a search engine to do research now, because mass generated shit articles clog everything up. Using ai to parse ai results is just absurd.

If you aren't capable of running a search on your own, chances are high that you won't be able to turn anything into a useful story anyway. There's a degree of competency to writing. It's called "craft", and no amount of ai can bypass it if you want to write. So learning how to parse bad search results into useful information is part of the learning curve. Either that, or you learn the Dewey decimal system.

Edit: to answer the title question: editing. Self published writers simply don't have access to editors and copy editors. A good, locally hosted, LLM would be able to fill that gap

Or is there a much better, easier way to look up niche real-world details like that?

Yeah, a search engine...

The first one was invented over 35 years ago.

Most of them, just read the first Wikipedia entry

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confectionery_in_the_English_Renaissance

After reading about it, you'd recognize some names like "fritter" and already have an idea of modern versions to visualize.

Then you can search for modern recreations of those recipies if you want to actually see what they look like. Because if you meant image generation. You'll get slop you can't and shouldn't trust. You'll never know if it's accury

Think of it like a flamethrower, extremely powerful and extreme dangerous, not for any kind of subtle work, but if you need to blast a field of weeds it's the best way to do it.

AI is destroying the planet and 100% based on the work and knowledge of individuals. Most of them haven't agreed or even been asked if is okay to make profit of their work.

There is NO ethical use of A.I.

Every decade of my life, new technologies for doing creative work have emerged that purport to reduce the workload of creatives yet always produce an inferior product. 3D CGI in film supplanted hand-drawn animation and now most kids movies look like shit. Digital special effects and motion capture supplanted practical effects, and now films don't hold up visually at all. Now we have the idiot box, and not only does it turn the written word from gold into lead, the effects of its use have frequently lead to decreased intelligence, more psychosis, placated personality disorders, and just straight-up fascist misinformation.

But, I am a permissive critic, and I'm always interested in what motivates a creative choice over whether a work is merely entertaining or pleasant. If Satan himself took a burning shit in your hand and you fingerpainted with it, I would be spellbound if you managed to do something interesting and meaningful with it; most of us would just scream in pain and jump from a window without delay. That's the beauty of art, don't you think?