Anyone else routinely using AI in their day-to-day life now?

[mybestchildismycat]

I started playing about with chatgpt a couple of months ago, but it's only really been in the last couple of weeks I've really got the hang of prompting it and I'm just blown away.

I'm using it daily for work: probably about half the work I do can benefit from chatgpt in some shape or form. But I'm also using it personally too - in just the last few days its helped me to turn some random ingredients into an edible meal, plan a city break against a specific set of requirements, recommend a new card game that our kids would enjoy, diagnose why my plant is losing it's leaves... the list goes on and on.

What made me really stop and think today was that I googled something and found myself thinking how... underwhelming it was. Just pages and pages of links that I then have to figure out myself. It shocked me to realise how quickly my own expectations and behaviours have shifted.

Anyone else finding chatgpt (and other similar technologies) are creeping into their everyday lives? In what ways?

I’ve used it to help me rewrite and summarise presentations and speeches.

Thats it really…

I used it for the first time today to help draft an email that I just needed a bit of prompting on. I have a couple of pieces of work to do over the next couple or days that I will use it for as well.

I haven't considered non work possibilities yet but will try some of yours. I did see the warning about it not always being correct so would check anything factual for now until it improves.

Nope. I'm a writer. If I had to use AI to help me express things, I'd be in trouble!

What platform are you using? I've only dabbled with Google Bard

Are you a journalist? The list of things you've given it to do sounds very formulaic.

I was underwhelmed by Chat GPT the original version for my work such as writing academic papers. It's not accurate at all and what's produced is just too low quality. It can't really fully understand the papers it's citing (as well as making them up) and so it doesn't add anything to the whole process for me, just yet anyway.

I do use AI (other programmes) for grammatical mistakes (I use two for this) and another programme to find networks of linked papers, specifically for academics.

I'm not against AI use but I certainly couldn't be arsed around prompting it to deliver me a meal recipe or indeed shopping for a holiday. It's too much faff to prompt it correctly for things I can already do.

It is quite good at writing sad letters, I'm sure that if I were writing copy for a charity then it would be very helpful, Chat GPT emotes quite well.

Surely there are lots of ways it could help with the process of writing though, without actually writing for you? Brainstorming ideas? Proofing? Checking for consistency? Depending on the kind of writer you are, it could help you promote yourself or find new outlets for your work. Literally anything you can think of.

I use it but - as others have said - with a really strict eye on it’s increasingly obvious limitations on accuracy (it’s shocking!), style (so easy to spot!) and it’s ability to be contemporaneous (2021 anyone?).

I’ve never used it and at this stage I can’t think of what I would use it for, but I think that’s because I’m stuck in the past! I’m sure I couldn’t have imagined what an impact the internet would have on my life if you’d asked me in 1994.
For your examples, I don’t find it difficult to create recipes or meals myself, I enjoy researching trips and I would use google to fix a plant problem. Maybe I’d use it for the game suggestion, but I’d probably ask a friend with similar aged kids.
I can imagine if I found writing presentations or articles (two things I do regularly) difficult I could use it, but I like writing those things and wouldn’t want to outsource them.

Haha no definitely not a journalist (or a generative ai engine 😀) , and no doubt what I've done with it so far is actually very basic compared to many people who have been working with it for a while.

Reasonably amusing that the OP feels written by ChatGPT...

No. I'm a Luddite. I don't think AI has been launched with proper safeguards in place, so I'll avoid it.

No- found it a bit shit to be honest.
it presents very superficial information so useless for work and by the time I’ve prompted it to write an email or whatever I could have written it myself. I prefer the multiple links given by google. At least I can judge whether to trust the information given or not.

I'm a technical writer, it's my profession, so brainstorming, promotion etc don't apply.
My human colleagues review and proofread things, especially as tone is really important. There's been a lot of chat about AI at my work but we all still think we're irreplaceable. Maybe we've got our heads in the sand...

That makes sense, where there is signiifcant subject matter expertise involved.

When it comes to tone: I actually have to do quite a lot of copywriting in my job (I'm not great at it, but it's a small company and I'm the best we've got) and I've loved how I can use it to refine my tone by prompting it with a source that I'm trying to emulate. Or quickly simplify my language. Or shorten something by x %.

Perhaps that's the point - right now, it's no substitute for a truly expert human, but in the real world organisations are staffed by generally mediocre people like me who it can comfortably outperform!

It can outperform quite a lot of my students, but not me (yet).

I'm using the original OpenAI ChatGPT.

Yes frequently. I write reports daily. Use chat gpt to generate 3 or 4 reports using similar prompts. Take the best bits. Edit, proof read, spell check etc. It's a very handy starting point and has increased output.

That sounds not too dissimilar from how I'm using it. There's always lots of editing involved, but as a starting point it's a total game changer. It's definitely increased my productivty, if for no other reason than I find it easy and enjoyable to get stuck straight into a copywriting task now, rather than staring helplessly at a blank screen for ages waiting for inspiration to strike.

It's exceptionally good at writing exam questions!

The OP is talking only about writing - but @Ozgirl75 and @Thelnebriati
everyone's been using AI for years, it's the thing that does spell check and grammar on Word documents (and similar), It's what runs spam filters in your email. It's Siri and Alexa, all those targeted ads on Facebook, search engines and Netflix recommendations. And yes Google. Even face recognition on your phone is down to AI. And we'd all be lost without Satnav!
It's a very useful tool, and while at the moment you can recognise something written by ChatGPT or a piece of AI generated art, it's still learning and improving. I use it as a prompt for my designs: ten short slogans about Autumn' etc.

This rod you using it to write work reports and emails- how can you use it for work without putting confidential information into it?

This isn't nice of me I know, but just among us I've had this kind of sneaking squeamish feeling about ChatGPT ever since that time she told me that Boris Johnson has two daughters with the exact same name - first, middle and last. When I nicely asked her to catch herself on and think about what she was saying, she just took me totally literally.

"What are the odds?" asked I - thinking I was being supportive and tactful and helping her think for herself, as one does - "that his first wife would use his future second wife's name hypenated with his for her baby daughter?" Chattie just totally deadpan told me that she couldn't calculate the odds and then went on and on for a page and a half justifying why not.

Sad.

Decades ago there was a project attempting to get a computer system to understand encyclopedic knowledge, though I don't know what happened to the project.

When it generated errors due to missing assumptions, it was getting "taught" things like Fathers/mothers are older than their children.

Maybe encyclopedic knowledge is the thing that ChatGP needs, and maybe someone's already tackled this.

I wouldn't know how to use it tbh. I am quite techy but not cone across it. I think it seems a great way for people to deskilled.

My son uses it for his Y7 English homework - writing poems etc