With copilot included in Professional-grade Office 365 and some politician claiming that their government should use AI to be more efficient. I am curious on whether some of you did use “AI” to get some productive things done. Or if it’s still mostly a toy for you.
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I would say that I have used an LLM for productive tasks unrelated to work. I run a superhero RPG weekly, and have been using Egyptian & north African myths as the origin for my monsters of the week. The LLM has taken my research and the monster-creating phase of my prep from being multiple hours to sometimes under one hour - I do confirm everything the LLM tells me with either Wikipedia or a museum. I can also use an LLM to generate exemplary images of the various monsters for my players, as a visual aid.
That means I have more time to focus on the “game” elements - like specific combats, available maps, and the like. I appreciate the acceleration it provides by being a combined natural-language search engine and summary tool. Frankly, if Ask Jeeves (aka ask(dot)com) was still good at parsing questions and providing clear results, I would be just as happy using it.
My physics professor has us compare our answers to physics problems with a LLM’s output. Somehow, the AI is even worse at physics then I am, it once simplified (4pi2) to 4.
I use it all the time, and not just for myself or for work. Yesterday I fed my son’s study guide into ChatGPT and had it create a CSV file with flash cards for Anki. It’s great at any kind of transformation / summarizing or picking out specific information.
When school sends me overly verbose messages about everything that’s going on I can feed the message into ChatGPT and have it create an ical file that has events for the important stuff that happens in school in in the coming week.
I used it to write a greeting card for my dad on his birthday (“I’m giving him X, these are his interests, give me ten suggestions for greeting cards”).
I have it explain the reasons behind news stories (by searching for previous information and relating it to the news story). I ask tons of questions about anything I wonder about in the world such as chemical processes, the differences between oil frying and air frying, finding scientific papers about specific things, how to factory reset my Bose headphones… the list goes on.
Its great for reading docs, I don’t have to search through to find out how to get a user’s playlists using the Spotify api
I work in maintenance. I’ve looked some stuff up.
I have used it as a nicer version of web search, mostly for “How do I write code using this library I’m not yet familiar with?” It provides passable tutorials when the library’s documentation is sparse (I get it) or poorly written (they tried 🤷♂️).
I don’t use AI for productive work, for the same reasons I don’t stir my soup with a dishrag.
Pretty good for recipes, tho’.
When I had a mold problem it was affecting my mind. I couldn’t think straight or focus, so I had ChatGPT make me a step by step plan for dealing with it, and it had it break each step down into nested sub-steps until no step was more than five minutes of effort, then I had it format the plan to copy-paste into workflowy.
It was really helpful. I could have made that plan myself, except that I was fucked up.
I use it in two ways.
ChatGPT as an interactive search. Last one was about EU GDPR compliance checklist to give a quick answer on what areas need to be looked at. I use it like once a week for work.
Productive in othen ways I use it once a month for recipes. Recipes are probably my favourite since I can say “Write it using grams and ml” and "give me some options to replace eggs and it writes out a legit recipe based on these millions of annoying blogs recipes.
Jetbrains AI auto complete for programming which is getting better slowly and I’m getting the hang of using it. It’s really good for cases where I have a common thing that I don’t remember the syntax of and I just type a name of a variable like “cspHeaderValue” and it will format thing that’s very annoying to look up based on what I some values I wrote above.
I’m not a 10x engineer now for it, it’s more like +10% overall and really depends on the task. I can see it go up to around +50% but an AI plateau might come before then.
I have been this week, for the first time.
I’m using Hugo to design a new website and Gemini has been useful in find the actual useful documentation that I need. Much faster and more accurate than trawling the official pages, and does a better job of providing relevent examples. It’s also really good at sensing what I’m actually asking, even if I’m clumsy at the phrasing.
And for those who continue to say AI isn’t really useful for learning - another thing I’ve been using it for. “write perl to convert a string to only container lowercase, converting any non-alpha chars to dashes” - I’ve learned how to do stuff like that over and over again, but the exact syntax falls out of my head after a few months of not doing it. AI is good at providing a quick recollect. I’ve already learned perl properly (including from paper books - yes, I first wrote perl a quarter of a century ago) - and forgotten it so many times. AI doesn’t prevent me learning, just makes it faster.
Pretty useful for software engineering, particularly helpful in writing a test suite, you still need to actually check the output though ofc
Also made use of it for writing my end of year review to solve the blank page problem, I find it a lot easier to edit down than starting HR stuff like that entirely from scratch
I used AI to generate random fake data to use in training on Excel , also to understand various concepts in my feild of study and to answer my sudden random questions
I use it as a glorified Google search since Google search is absolute dogshit these days. But that’s about it. ChatGPT is one of the most over hyped bullshit I’ve ever seen in my life.
Absolutely agree!! LLMs are good for quick “shallow” search for me (stuff I would find on google in a few minutes). Bad for “deeper” learning (because it’s not capable of doing it). It’s overhyped.
You shouldn’t use it for search like that. They (Gemini and ChatGPT) love to be confidently incorrect. Their perfect grammar trick you into believing their answers, even when they are wildly inaccurate.
certain offerings like MS’s cite their sources inline. i always use it to find those sources and then read it from the sources.
I think I’m going to disagree with the accuracy statement.
Yes - AIs can be famously inaccurate. But so can web pages - even reputable ones. In fact, any single source of information is insufficient to be relied upon, if accuracy is important. And today, deliberate disinformation on the internet is massive - it’s something we don’t even know the scale of because the tools to check it may be compromised. </tinfoilhat>
It takes a lot of cross-referencing to be certain of something, and most of us don’t bother if the first answer from either method ‘feels right’.
AI does get shown off when it’s stupidly wrong, which is to be expected, but the world doesn’t care when it’s correct time and again. And each iteration gets better at self-checking facts.
I use GPT in the sense of “I need to solve X problem, are there established algorithms for this?” which usually gives me a good starting point for actual searching.
Most recent use-case was judging the similarity of two strings: I had never heard of “Levenschtein distance” before, but once I had that keyword it was easy to work from there.
Also: cmake and bash boilerplate
I use FastGPT on Kagi and it lists the sources for its conclusions, so it’s like a better aimed search
As if Google is any better
Copilot is actually linked directly into their search engine and it provides the links it pulls its data from. But you’re correct, ChatGPT is not hooked into the live internet and should not be used for such things. I’m not sure if Gemini is or not since I haven’t used it or looked into it much, so I can’t comment on it.
Chatgpt also pulls from the web and cites its sources.
Claude sonnet 3.5 and GPT 4o are good for coding
I wanted to update the logo for my business, I tried hiring an artist though a number I know from having working for various comic cons. No luck, so I went to friends i knew that were artists, got strung along with no results. Tried hiring via Craigslist and Reddit, got garbage.
I was out $1600 with nothing to show for it except some sketches that were no where near what I wanted. So I tried using AI. It was horrid. Anything that was half decent was cropped and unusable.
FYI, in the future, just use Fiverr. I had the same problems when helping my wife get her business logo created. People either wanted a ridiculous amount of money for a simple logo ($1500+ and formal contracts) or like $100-200 just for prototyping to start and then another $100-200 for final image (the latter was commonplace on the freelance artist subreddits). I went with a couple artists on Reddit and they completely missed on what she wanted, despite us providing ample examples and our own rough sketch ideas.
She ended up finding a local artist through a friend who captured the logo exactly how she pictured it, and it ended up costing around $150. Ironically, I didn’t know she did that, and I’d hit up a random artist on Fiverr who came very close to what the local artist did and it was only like $50.
Sorry for the tangent, I was just somewhat surprised at how complicated and potentially expensive getting a simple logo created. I know artists gotta eat, but some of them wanted more than what plumbers or electricians ask for, which is crazy to me.
I have graphic design experience and a whole bunch of free time at work. I’d be willing to do whatever you need for free.
