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?

No

I hope AI photos like this are banned as it’s false advertising

Using it as a therapist/parenting advice and general relationship advice is something I do too.

I don’t have a big support network and it’s more useful than phoning a friend and sounding off.

It’s the main thing I use it for along with planning holidays.

It's neither sad nor scary. There are very strict guardrails against supporting people to harm themselves. AI 'coaching' (I would not call it therapy) is extremely helpful. It has saved my mental health through bereavement and family fall out. It is helping me through parenting and occasionally with relationship issues with DH and even with how to manage work situations. The outcome of all of this has been unequivocally helpful and positive.

Actually this is an established philosophical position posited by Kristeva basically summarised as there are no new ideas, everything is a synthesis of ideas that have come before

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertextuality

Good grief. It's really not.

'It's caused people to commit suicide!' or 'it made up facts for a legal case!' really aren't the gotchas people think.

No one (with half a brain) thinks AI is perfect...yet. Even the newest models need a control group, need testing and fact checking and can sometimes go wrong.

But as sad as they are, the few cases where AI has given a dangerous or dangerously wrong output are irrelevent in the long term. They're just bumps in the road as these models are being improved and they don't mean that the models are useless or will fall out of favour or can be scoffed at and ignored.

When the first motor cars were invented in the late 1800's and then the first crashes started happening and deaths occurred, i've no doubt it caused outrage, scandals and calls to stop using them.

How many of you have jumped in your horse and cart lately?

You are wrong.

I disagree.

A huge number of books that should never have been written are churned out to make money. There is a huge difference between Julia Donaldson and David Walliams for example.

Millions of kids books are utter shite. You can't tell me that half the books on the shelves are any better than AI slop in any measurable metric.
Not that I would choose to create AI bedtime stories above reading good books to my kids if I had them now but I can see how by inserting the child or familiar people in to the stories it would be a fun idea. We had books like that as kids - remember?

I used to love the process of using a dictionary, thesaurus or encyclopaedia. Just something different about it.
I use Google now first and only use Ai if Google can’t find the info.
AI is scarily fast.

I am wary of it. If it was human it’d be an annoying one. Constantly adjusting itself to suit you and sucking up.

And it worries me that if the guardrails are removed it goes completely rogue.

Blimey I seem to have caused utter outrage. Just to clarify I read, and own hundreds of printed books to my children. But I'm a knackered, dyslexic, working mum who when their kids ask me for something about their pets as the main characters or something specific I use AI. I don't get them listening to a computer every night it's on occasions, and I read it to them. They love it. And so far on my many trips to the library I am yet to find a book about my kids and their pets. We have also then designed the front covers or our own pictures off the story. But I see I need to hang my head in shame about my awful parenting.

Do you make it clear on the listing that some of the images are fake? If not that's really dodgy and false advertising and I would be very pissed off if I bought an item where someone had used fake images.

Oh I use it for sorts of stuff including as a daily journal. It gives you new perceptions to look at.

Yes it even told me where to go last year on holiday when I came without one of my medications, what to say etc. I was in a Greek island. Yes it was spot on too.

Yes I've got it to write emails etc, then edited so it has got my touch. Amazing for form filling help too

Generally speaking I like it. It's an amazing tool

I find it useful. When I look in the fridge and there is nothing to eat, I list everything that I have it comes up with ideas I hadn't thought of. Useful for using up forgotten items at the back of the freezer. Not detailed recipes, but good for inspiration.
Chat gpt didn't work, but Copilot did when my daughter's iphone acquired a known bug which didn't allow it to remove a built in app. Lots of googling said it was a known bug and there was nothing that could be done. If AI hadn't worked, I would have had to pay to take in somewhere.
Brilliant help with filling out DLA forms. I input all the information and it just phrased the info I gave in such a way as to hit the points. It would have taken me weeks without the help. I shared some of the evidence I had (from professional reports and email correspondence with school - all personal info removed) and it used those to pull the answers together.

I use it to plan my menu for the week. It'll give me the recipes, methods and turn it into a shopping list, all in seconds!!

I don't use ai for that I just tell him from memory or I'll make something up myself, but my point is that not all parents feel able to do that. Just as not all parents will have easy access to physical books, just as not all parents have good literacy skills for a variety of reasons.

As a carer I spend lots of time taking notes about day to day things to report to a medical team weekly. So I use AI to summarise trends. It works, with supervision, and it saves me several hours per week. However, in order to make that work I had to develop some software to extract the info from my calendar and WhatsApp conversations, in format which will limit imprecisions by the model. That's not feasible for most people.

I do use AI as a thinking partner, if you know how it can be useful.
Once I managed to produce a very good report to NHS backed by dozens of studies and NHS guidelines, to argue that they were breaking their own guidelines. It took me lots of effort though, but admittedly reviewing that many studies directly would have been more time consuming.

If you take the time and thinking, any of the major models can teach subjects and concepts, including providing tailored revision questions, using examples from things and concepts you are already familiar with, and breaking it down to very basic ideas. This is actually useful to kids and adults, it makes for an infinitely patient tutor, and the models are trained on GCSEs and A level materials.

On another note, my son's school emails have benefited a lot from AI. For many years they were full of mistakes, unbelievable misspellings (think "ass" instead of "as" and countless others). They did not care at all, which was really sad given they are supposed to teach how to write a letter and to inspire kids to care about what they do. Or so I would hope. What an example...
Now magically all their emails are well written.
However the same people are still there at the keyboard. Undoubtedly just as half arsed as before.

That’s the first time I’ve heard or read that awful phrase, ‘had an eppy’ in about 20 years. You do realise that this is very offensive? Derived from having an epileptic fit…

@Summerunlover what type of things do you use it for with the glasses if you don’t mind me asking? I have a blind relative.

I say the modelled picture is an example and not the actual item.

But for items selling for a couple of pounds, it's just a handy addition. Of course if they were new items selling for high amounts, this is a different situation.

As I said, sometimes they are completely off, and then I don't use those photos. It is a tool. Use it or don't use it.

I've used it to explain in more depth my pre-op (hip replacement) blood test results, it was really interesting to see how they sat within the 'normal' range
I would add they all came back as normal, so I felt more confident checking via AI

Perhaps your prompts weren't clear enough. It does need precise requests and then it's wonderful for almost anything.

My ex sends me exhausting emails written by ChatGPT telling me where I am going wrong as a parent. If I reply to disagree or if I don’t reply at all he just escalates (not just more emails but haranguing me on the doorstep during handover) so now I put his emails into CoPilot and ask it to “draft a response that sounds like I’m agreeing with him but actually am disagreeing” and it writes the perfect reply. I send that to him and he thanks me for my “insightful” responses! His AI and my AI can now correspond with each other and completely leave me free of it all!

From all your comments on AI, it's pretty clear that you have no understanding of the subject. Why not do a bit of research - you might realise that it really can be very useful and it isn't just lazy to use it.

I’m well aware of this but I still continue to use it.

It may be sad to you and scary and yes I see what you mean but unfortunately that’s the reality of my life