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.
I find that the very best use case of LLMs are in the name it self–language. I can check my text is grammatically correct or not for example
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 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.
how to factory reset my Bose headphones
I don’t think it can get the information for this with 100% accuracy unless the process is same for all Bose headphones. How did it go?
and have it create an ical file that has events for the important stuff that happens in school in in the coming week.
How did this go? It can hallucinate stuff even when you post static data to it, last time I tried.
I don’t think it can get the information for this with 100% accuracy unless the process is same for all Bose headphones. How did it go?
Why not? I told it the model (Bose 700). It searched the web for information for that model, found an article that described how to do it, and provided me with the key points without having to scroll past tons of ads and noisy language. Of course it sometimes gives me the wrong info (usually because the sources are incorrect), but I’ll notice soon enough.
How did this go? It can hallucinate stuff even when you post static data to it, last time I tried.
It went perfectly. Again, there are certainly times when it makes errors / hallucinates, but I can fix those manually. In my example of producing flash cards for my son, we obviously had to proofread the cards but that’s much faster than writing all the cards by hand. One out of the 20 flash cards had a nonsensical question/answer so we just removed it.
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 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 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.
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
Absolutely. I’ve used it to write basic scripts that I didn’t feel like spending time on. I’ve also used it to write cover letters. I always make sure to peruse through it to see what it did and make sure it works or sounds right.
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.
Are you in my class?
Much as I dislike praising AI, I must admit I got some good results using an AI powered search engine for academic articles to find sources for a term paper I’m writing for a seminar class I’m taking for my masters degree.
What’s that? Which AI powered search engine?
I work in maintenance. I’ve looked some stuff up.
I basically use it on rare rare occasion to help get me “unstuck” with creative tasks, I don’t really use what it produces in the end, I wind up dismantling it entirely and rewriting it “properly” but it has a use you know?
Really worth listening to this podcast as well. It’s a guy teaching corporate teams to make best use of AI. He goes over how to use it to get really great use by using it as a discussion rather than just asking it a question and expecting and accurate answer in the first instance
AI has been most useful for tech support for me. I wouldn’t have been able to switch to Linux completely if AI didn’t instantly find solutions for me, rather than being told by the community to read tomes of documentation.
I also use it a lot to find how to get office apps to do what I want.
I’m famous at work for being a poet, when I actually just ask AI to write a short witty poem.
You can use image generators to make nice personalised cards to share on special events.
AI can make mind maps and things like that if you tell it what you want.
Everyday, the company I work for have all their code in SAS, I use our LLM to translate it to python. I also write my python scripts and ask the llm to refract it and optimize it. Sometimes it save me 2 seconds so I just use my code that is usually simple, but other times it saves me half an hour.
