How are people using AI to help with everyday life?

I mostly use mine for menu planning and recipes.

I don’t use it. 😐 Maybe I should learn for fear of being left behind!

I use ChatGPT for absolutely loads! 😂 It's become a bit of a personal assistant, researcher, sounding board and life coach all rolled into one.

I use it to research health concerns, compare products and cars before buying, plan days out and holidays, and analyse finances.

I also use it to challenge my thinking, explore my strengths and weaknesses, and understand myself better.

I'm naturally curious and love researching things, so it's like having someone available 24/7 who never gets bored of my endless questions! 😂

My handwritings terrible but I write shopping lists etc by hand because it helps me remember what I need to buy (when I inevitably forget the actual list). For revision etc rewriting notes by hand is a more effective way of learning them than just re-reading. For work I would always send emails/type things out though as I wouldn't inflict my writing on others.

Congratulations on your shopping lists and extensive notebook collection, I guess? 😂 Nobody is suggesting handwriting is a lost art or that you need to abandon your pen, but writing your grocery list by hand doesn't make you intellectually superior to someone who types theirs. And if you're that concerned about technology doing things for you, why not write out all your Mumsnet posts by hand, photograph them with a film camera, get the film developed, scan the pictures and upload them here? Surely that would be even better for your brain. Wouldn't want to take any technological shortcuts now, would we?

My lessons are far easier to plan! When you’re having to deliver over achieving, achieving, struggling, send, scaffolding for every lesson. It makes a massive difference.

I don’t.

I think deskilling ourselves like this will prove disastrous.

I write by hand @pinck , I much prefer it to typing. And it’s better for your brain (there are studies on it).

To be fair, my work doesn’t involve writing but I write a lot at home- shopping lists, to do lists, plans, ideas. I have a few notebooks on the go at any one time; one by my bed, one in my handbag, one in the car etc

I realise most people type everything and use AI, and that’s their business and no concern of mine. As long as no one takes the piss out of me for the way I do things, we’re all good.

Right, so you never outsource a task you're perfectly capable of doing yourself simply because it's tedious or time-consuming? 😂 Why not write everything by hand while you're at it? The whole point of technology is to make life easier. If I can explain my thoughts to AI and have it write an email in thirty seconds that would otherwise take me ten minutes to type out, why on earth wouldn't I? The thoughts are still mine, the message is still mine, and the recipient gets exactly the same information. I'm genuinely baffled by the idea that communication somehow becomes less authentic because I didn't personally type every word but congratulations on turning wasting your own time into some sort of moral virtue.

I use it as travel agent, meal planner, garden adviser. Very much quicker than searching individual items. Currently working out how to get it to sort our VAT each quarter so that accountant can just check through and file. Will save me £££ in accounting fees if I can do it.

AI can communicate someone's actual thoughts perfectly well if they provide those thoughts in the first place.

What not just communicate those thoughts yourself, if you are able to share them with the AI?

My favourite uses so far have been to upload a photo of my living room and ask for suggestions of how to restyle it -
also the same with new hairstyles and colour

You're still operating under the assumption that people using AI simply type in a vague prompt and blindly copy and paste whatever comes out. AI can communicate someone's actual thoughts perfectly well if they provide those thoughts in the first place. And I'm not sure why spending twenty minutes writing an unnecessarily long email is somehow more respectable than spending two minutes producing a clear, concise one. The recipient's time is being used either way. Surely the quality and relevance of the communication matter more than how much effort went into typing it? 😂

I dont use it. I have switched from Google to DuckDuckGo as my default browser as you get the choice whether you want AI or not. I dont want a bot owned by multi millionaires telling me how to run my life.

Exactly! So you understand what I actually think even if you disagree with it. Whereas a verbose AI generated email wouldn't tell you anything. That's why it's not actually proper communication

My point about length wasn't that humans can't also be long winded. But at least then it's also my time I'm wasting because it takes time to type out a long winded argument. AI let's you write hundreds of emails which take no time to write but a lot of time to read and respond to.

Your point was that AI-generated emails are often too long, repetitive, and don't reflect the sender's actual concerns, making them harder to respond to. There, one sentence. You really didn't need several paragraphs and an entire hypothetical about PE uniforms to explain that. 😂

Why don't you summarise what my point was then?

Readable doesn't equal well-written, though and that's an awful lot of writing for someone who just complained about AI being too wordy and wasting people's time.You could've made your point in about three sentences, but apparently verbosity is only a problem when a computer does it.

It was perfectly readable.
I know what she means. I make spelling mistakes myself (and sometimes my phone autocorrect does odd things). Everyone does. But the "bad writing" AI does is different. It's normally very wordy which costs a lot of time to read, repetitive and crucially isn't always the senders own thinking/reasons. I can ask AI to generate an email explaining why my son shouldn't have to wear a uniform for PE. It will happily write out a long list of all the reasons PE uniforms should not be compulsory. The receiver then has to read and respond to the whole thing without actually being any the wiser about the specific reason I actually don't want my son wearing the uniform. So it's much harder for them to reach a compromise that might suit us both, harder for them to empathise with my concerns (because they didn't read my concerns they read a computers best guess). It's also low effort for me and means that I don't need to sit and think about the reasons I don't want my son wearing uniform as I draft the email. At it's worst AI emails basically "perform" communication without any of the benefits actual communication brings.

And of course because it's lower effort to AI generate an email than write one you can massively increase the emails you send. Everyone can. But that creates overwhelm and makes it harder to work out whats important.

pinck I don’t see the irony here. The poster is obviously a real human being having a bit of a vent online. They are 100% right about this and if I’m not being sufficiently grammatically impressive in explaining that to you, well so be it.

If you had to deal everyday with some of the superficial, bullet-pointed nonsense that nowadays gets churned out ad Infinitum by people who mistakenly think it makes them appear more serious, credible etc etc, you would understand. It’s a colossal time-waster for our public-facing systems eg Acas, any helpline etc.

Lol, the irony of complaining about badly written emails when your own post is this poorly written. You're clearly trying so hard to sound intelligent, but somehow you've managed to produce something that reads considerably worse than anything AI would write.

Cope harder

What do you have to say about Mumsnet using it extensively?

Slightly different from the spreadsheets and holiday planning: the most useful thing for us has been using it with the kids rather than around them. Helping to explain solutions to math problems in a way that my 10 year old understands is use case number one!
The habit I'd recommend is "check it against something you already know", because it can sound completely sure and still be wrong. And if you have older children, it's worth asking whether any of their apps have an AI chat built in. Snapchat's sits at the top of the chat list, and most kids won't mention it unless you ask.

Had an interesting conversation with someone about the recruitment process they have. They employ for a post every year for a graduate and this year had double the applications. They realised that the questions asked in their form - as they have a form for requesting the job, the questions that were filled in by AI were so similar they knew what was coming next.

the forms that weren’t filled in by AI were more flavour of the person and gave character, rather than being bland. They felt the application using AI had list any character and it was sad to see.

to apply for the post the requirement is you have a degree.