What do you use AI for?

[thehousewiththesagegreensofa]

I feel as though I need to take a leap into the unknown and embrace AI. But I'm not entirely sure how. My mind was blown the other day when I read on a thread that someone was using ChatGPT to generate recipes for her and all she has to do was provide the suggested ingredients. That just hadn't occurred to me as something you could use it for. So, how do you use it?

@Nori10

• ask general questions eg explain the plot of a certain film

That's great. I might try to use it to tell me the ending of a film I'm curious about but don't want to bother watching all the way through!

Me - nothing
DH - everything

@mactire
Thank you for answering.

So very sorry you went through that 😔 and so sorry you had such an appalling counselling experience xx

How do you use it to take meeting notes? That’s such a good idea. How does it “listen” though?

What platform do people use - an AI app or website or other?

ChatGPT is probably the most widely known. I prefer Gemini myself but that’s just a personal preference.

Both freely available online, just Google them :)

As well as many of the ways already mentioned, I use ChatGpt to critique my writing from different points of view - eg industry specialist, editor with 20 years experience, ideal client, my client’s customer, social media manager, etc. and give suggestions on how to give it more credibility, make it more impactful, persuasive, professional, or casual, depending on what I’m working on.

If I need to make a piece of writing shorter I’ll ask it to look for redundancies that can be removed without impacting the message.

I also use it for content ideas. For example, I can feed it 7 concepts from my industry and a list of 7 different types of social media posts and it will give me a content matrix containing 49 suggested titles.

It’s a great timesaver.

Thank you, I appreciate that x

I've just clicked on "threads I'm on" and realised I had all of the answers. I wasn't expecting that. If I had, I wouldn't have disappeared for 24 hours!
This is fascinating. I had no idea it could be used in so many ways, particularly the ideas of using it for therapy or even just a random chat or for planning trips and that sort of thing.
I had heard other people mention it for work and still don't quite understand this. We have a committee meeting coming up as take it in turns to minute but it usually descends into a terribly polite row as someone isn't taking their turn. If AI minuted it, that issue would disappear. But how does this work? Some of the information discussed at these meetings is really sensitive and all of it is confidential. Therefore, I'm not sure if I'd be allowed to use it in this way. I need to work this out!
@JanesCakeTin that is a good question and it really made me laugh. For the last 15 years, MN has been solving all of my dilemmas. Some of these posts show that AI can do that too, but perhaps more accurately,
I think I need the go & explore

Not really, I was about 95% sure they were using AI and it sounded insincere. If someone thinks that's good enough I have no wish to employ them. If they can get it to write something outstanding so be it, but this person wasn't giving good enough prompts to get something that passed as human written. They are within their rights to send that in, but similarly, I am to junk their application; an insincere response isn't good in my industry.

Say what you like, I was confirming my suspicions. The person we appoint will need to write regularly as part of the role, if they resort to chatGTP (or can't write in a human enough way) then they aren't right for the job. I'd decided they wouldn't be shortlisted before I read that but checked out of interest. It may well be that someone else has used it and I haven't spotted that it's ChatGTP, but that is likely because they have a much better idea which prompts to put in. And lucky escape, maybe, but none of my team have resigned in the 4 years I've led the team in an industry where 18 months is the average length of time people stick.

How are people using AI to take notes from meetings please? This seems like a game changer I spend ALL DAY on teams!

but you then have to look through various articles which may or may not be accurate. AI is not 100% trustworthy but instead of giving you a list of links it will in a few seconds write you a concise explanation. Meaning you don't have to look at a range of different other links to come to the same conclusion.

Uh...some of the current versions will be writing that 'concise explanation' based on what's on the net including those same inaccurate sources, but won't give details of what they used. So you've less chance of assessing the reliability. If you want medical info and use a conventional search, you can see if it's a site that should be reliable, you can get references from peer reviewed papers etc. Whereas (unless this has changed recently) if you ask ChatGPT to supply references it will cheerfully oblige with something completely fictitious. It writes things which are untrue but sound authoritative. Fgs at this stage don't rely on what a free AI tells you for anything important (or recent).

AI has been around for decades. It's nothing new, it's just getting more sophisticated.

😂 struck a nerve did I

That was a lovely speech.

But you didn't confirm anything because chatgpt is notoriously terrible at recognising things written by AI and gets them wrong a lot of the time. So all you did was use AI to do your job for you, poorly. Which is hypocrisy at its finest when you wouldn't hire someone for doing the exact same thing.

There's been something of a step change recently though, partly I think because of sheer compute power and 'big data' now being absolutely humongous data!

I'm a teacher and I've used it very effectively to plan lessons. I had to plan a unit of English and couldn't decide on a text to base it on. I asked Chat GPT to give me some options after telling it some of the requirements and it found me a great text. I then asked it to plan me a series of 15 lessons based on that text and told it which parts of the curriculum I needed to cover, and it did it in seconds. I adapted and fleshed if out a bit but it saved me hours of work.

One thing that's not been mentioned is the privacy issue.

Gen AI models now learn from the information typed in by humans. And not only learning from it, but the companies that own the AI models are making money from it (just like social media companies have been doing for years). Don't put any information into a free tool - eg ChatGPT - which is private to you or your organisation (or other people's data - eg about children you teach at school).

One way around this is paying the services - eg my company has bought Microsoft Co-Pilot and we're only allowed to put corporate info into this (not ChatGPT) including meeting notes. But even this isn't watertight or future proof.

And remember if you're not paying, you're the product :)

Eg, https://techround.co.uk/artificial-intelligence/private-information-sold-train-ai/

I've just read this whole thread waiting for someone to bring this up. So many people seem to be plugging their company data into AI tools to produce reports with seemingly little thought to the data protection implications.

Yeah, I worry about the privacy and data protection aspect. When I use it I always exclude identifying data like company or individual's names. And I would never input proprietary info or data or confidential data either. I still get a bit cold because the first time I tried using it for actual client work I didn't take the names out. It was ONCE and it wasn't confidential information but I sort of have this massive fear that it's now all part of ChatGBT!

Not really. I'd discounted them before ChatGTP, it was insincere and read like it was done by AI. Checking it was essentially a bit of fun which all but confirmed my suspicions.

Having 'a bit of fun' with someone's job application sounds inappropriate. I reckon that social skills and the ability to demonstrate compassion, fairness and justice, so basic humanity in the workplace will become ever more important as GenAI evolves. For 3 reasons: 1. while GenAI carries the risk of bias, many systems are already being programmed with clear ethical principles and can be more objective and inclusive than people. 2. Employee social skills and emotional intelligence will be invaluable when most processes can be automated as this will free up time to focus on the human factor and human connections. 3. As the risk of inbuilt bias remains there will be a great need of professionals with excellent understanding of diversity, inclusion, ethics, etc to correct AI bias. Those, @ACynicalDad are the skills to develop sooner than later 😉

I wouldn't hire someone whose motivation letter was clearly or likely written by ChatGPT

Writing ability, articulation, creativity ... human personality ... are all intellectual skills and attributes I'm looking for when I hire. If these aren't clearly demonstrated then I won't progress their application to the next stage. You can usually tell. Applications written using GPT tend to be bland and generic.

But I'm sure there are other jobs where it doesn't matter if a machine wrote your application letter, where all employers need is the list of work experience + qualifications. Eg jobs where a person's writing skills aren't important.

I use ChatGPT for writing reports and articles. For example if I want to back up an argument, I can say “I believe xyz, can you suggest some sources which back up this opinion? And it gives me quotes to use. Obviously I have to check to make sure they’re correct, but it’s great for pointing me in the right direction.

I also use it for learning because it can answer questions and explain things that I don’t understand.

I use Stable Diffusion to generate images. For example I’ll ask it for a seagull wearing a party hat, and it’ll generate several options. Then I use them as inspiration for drawing my own artwork. In fact AI can actually draw editable vector artwork, so it gives you something to start with and you can edit and change colours as you see fit.