Has anyone actually found AI useful for everyday mum stuff?

[JennaMadeAU]

Feeling like I'm late to the party but I've been playing around with ChatGPT and some of it is genuinely useful. Not the weird sci-fi stuff, just practical things.

The meal planning one has been brilliant - told it what my kids will/won't eat, our budget, and it planned dinners with a shopping list. Saved us money.

Also used it to draft a politely assertive email to DS's school. Would have taken me an hour; solid first draft in 10 seconds.

Anyone else using it? Or am I going to get told I'm being replaced by a robot?

Because TripAdvisor tends towards the negative reviews, then I'd also need to go and look up various family bloggers and reviewers, maybe some tiktok videos to get oth sides / variety. I did it before but it takes much longer and chatgpt will just summarise all that and then I can make a decision.

Like previous poster I'm a bit lazy and a bit knackered and it makes life a bit easier 🤷‍♀️. Idc.

Not all AI's are equal.
I distrust free ChatGPT immensely, but do find Google AI/Gemini quite useful for searching and summarising. I like that it includes the list of sources so after e.g. asking a health question can click through to the full source.

I tried this. 5 day trip. It refused to believe there were 5 days and not 6, and then had an eppy when I pointed it out and fucked the entire thing

I've had a lot of success with it and while I dont use every suggestion some of the road trip ideas worked well. We used it for going north th south in Serbia and came up with a good use of time on our trip to Japan and yhe suggestion was way better than I had come up with and saved us a fortune.

The menu suggestions have been really good when I have been concise with our needs, stating what foods we dont want, what are favourite ingredients are, what our budget is, no repetition meals etc.

I haven’t found this at all with trip advisor. There tends to be a good balance if you bother to read what people have written. Soon websites like this won’t exist as everyone is too lazy to update, just wants to ask a programme.

pepperminticecream I completely agree about reading to kids - that's non-negotiable and one of the best parts of parenting. No robot is replacing story time in this house! The AI stuff is more for the boring admin that eats into time I could be spending WITH them.

FuckRealityBringMeABook fair point about TripAdvisor - I think the difference is you can ask follow-up questions like "my kids are 4 and 7, is it worth it for that age range specifically?" and get a more tailored answer than scrolling through 200 reviews. But honestly TripAdvisor still wins for recent reviews.

I think the people worried about outsourcing thinking have a really valid point. I'm not using it to make decisions - more like using it as a slightly smarter search engine for the mundane stuff. The thinking, the values, the actual parenting - that's still very much a human job and should stay that way.

Oh please share what the meal planner is OP. I despair planning meals for my twins who are like bloody Jack Spratt and his wife 😩

When satnav went mainstream people drove into lakes and down live railway tracks because they didn’t think they needed to use their eyes or brains and the tech “must” be right.

I’m seeing it now but to the power of about a million. A recent, very important, employment tribunal ruling which will
impact every woman in the workplace is being appeals because the judgement used AI which HALLUCINATED what the Equality Act says.

Honestly, it’s the end times for general human intelligence.

This one makes me feel sad. Reading physical books with children is a wonderful way to end the day. Looking at the pictures, them loving the rhythm of a particular author's work, talking about a favourite book. All so important.

Not to mention someone’s livelihood. And the author. And the editor. And the publisher.

Quite. I appreciate that people are busy etc, but I find it depressing that you're all so willing to delegate your thinking in this way. You know it's disastrous for the environment too? And it probably going to kill us all eventually. But hey, as long as it saves you writing a shopping list.

OP, your response sounds like ChatGPT wrote it. The last line especially sounds like it.

Ha, fair enough - I do tend to write like I'm drafting a work email even when I'm not. Occupational hazard of spending too long in marketing. Promise it's just me being a bit too formal on the internet, not a robot uprising.

😂

Totally agree.

I use it sometimes for for recipes when throwing meals together with random ingredients. Has helped me so far.

What? Like this?

Yes indeed.

What sort of appalling parent thinks going to AI is better than reading an actual book to their children. And yes, I am judging.

Those children will end up being the ones you hear about who try to swipe the pages of a book when they start school, because they've never actually seen how to turn pages.

AI certainly hasn't got a clue about cryptic crosswords. I do the Times and Guardian cryptics and sometimes, if I'm completely stuck, put the clue into Google and a crossword site will give the answer.

The AI answers which come up first are absolutely ridiculous, they try to answer a cryptic clue literally, so all you get is a mash up of definitions of various words in the clue which is as far away from the answer as is possible.

Wow has that really happened! That’s sad

As a keen cook I really wouldn't use it for anything but the most basic recipes.
It's a language prediction tool (a very advanced one), so if you say you want a meal with kidney beans, broccoli, tomato and cous cous it'll be able to get a load of recipes which have those ingredients and smush them together into something which looks like exactly the recipe you want. But noone has actually written it, which means noone has cooked it to see if it's tasty or not, how much seasoning it needs, how long to cook it for.
And it can make dangerous substitutions eg using a chickpea recipe but swapping chickpea for kidney beans without thinking about soaking them for long enough not to be poisonous. Because it can't think.

If you're just using it to find an actual existing recipe, that's another matter. But that's not AI that's just a search engine and we've had those for decades.

I'm surprised that you work in marketing and have a very corporate tone in your "natural" messages and yet said in your OP that AI is writing emails for you in 10 seconds which it would have taken you AN HOUR to write.

Being absolutely honest, how long are you actually spending generating, tweaking, and accuracy checking an email using AI versus how long it would have taken you using your brain?

Leave it in the box. You have a brain. You don’t need an overhyped predictive text machine taking over.

This!!!

😆That's why it's important to engage brain and check the sources linked.
I'm not getting that result, what else have you been searching for?

I have tried to use it for planning days out in London (specific ages of kids, areas, requirements). I found it disappointingly generic and it recommended stuff that was shut.

I also tried to get it to summarise which sessions at the 3-4 swimming pools near us are suitable for u5s because it seems to be a requirement of leisure centre websites that the timetables are horrendously user-unfriendly. It said "you could try checking the timetable for x leisure centre".

The most helpful use I’ve found so far is when I’ve been trying to make devices do things - ie when my kids got kindles and I needed to setup parental controls and link to my account. And when the iPad stopped sending requests to me for downloading apps and we couldn’t work out what we needed to do in the settings.

I’m sure I could have worked all of the above out eventually, but it probably saved me a good few hours of googling and swearing under my breath whilst the children complained about the delays!!

It’s also been helpful when filling in forms about DS who’s autistic. I usually give it the prompt, then rewrite what it says into my own words. Again, could (and have!) done it myself, but I’d rather save my brainpower and time!!