What do you use chatGPT for, if you use it at all?

[Groaaan]

A friend told me her workload has halved since she started using it but I couldn’t understand how, something to do with spreadsheets. Then I’ve just been reading an AMA where they are, very worryingly to me, having some kind of fantasy relationship with it.

I’ve used it to design an invitation to a 50th and for ideas about designing my new kitchen but nothing more.

Just wondering what other people use it for, if they do at all.

Obviously Chatgpt is significantly better than googling, which is why people prefer it

I used it recently to help rewrite my CV. It had some really useful suggestions and helped me sell myself better.

I also use it a lot to help me fix things around the house and for use with tech, for example if something goes wrong or I don't know how to do something in an app or system. I find it really helpful.

I use it for personal stuff - suggesting itineraries for holidays, helping me plan a new bed in the garden and what plants will work well where, to create images showing rooms in different colours/adding curtains etc. when I was decorating.

i wouldn’t use chatgpt at work as I work with too much data and I wouldn’t be allowed to use that kind of AI, but I use paid copilot and Claude at work to analyse spreadsheets, compare information, summarise information from different sources, help me refine comes, design newsletters, draft articles and documents, find things I’m not sure where they’re saved, all sorts of stuff. It saves me a lot of time but I have to put in effort to write the prompts to give me the information I am looking for, and I need to cast a human eye over what it creates and tweak to suit.

It coaches me through things I don’t know how to do for my small business. It keeps me on track when I start getting overwhelmed and want to give up. It does get things wrong, it’s a bit scatty sometimes and can be too agreeable so there’s a lot of back and forth. But together me and it accomplish things eventually!

I use it draft the outlines for articles I write

i use it to help me formulate an email where what I want to say is “fuck you and the horse you rode in on”

I use it to read meeting notes and give me my actions / outcomes.

I use it to make what I have written sharp for SEO

I use it to help (only help) with medical issues.

I find it excellent for planning travel itineraries and meal Plans.

All it is is a sounding board for me. It’s invaluable

I use it for work (co-pilot) all day every day.

I use it at home - for interior design, producing scaled layouts of rooms, recipes, to mock up garden redesigns we’re planning, it’s given me an itinerary and hotel recommendations for a forthcoming trip, ideas and timings for a museum/gallery/restaurant/drinks day in London with friends. I get it to remove backgrounds on Vinted photos. It did my ‘colours’ from photos I uploaded. The list is becoming endless.

I use it regularly to pick out infomation in reports. I’ll read the whole thing but ask ai to summarise it or pull certain bits that I need at my finger tips. I use it to write up my dictated notes, answer questions or re-write emails so they make more sense. I’m dyslexic so I use it as a more responsive spell checker too.

I never use it. It appears to be largely inaccurate (once telling me confidently that I could get a train to major city from next village....which has no train station or train line) and my brain still works. I often astonish my kids by finding stuff on Google more swiftly and accurately than they do because I know how to search and i know to be discerning with what comes up. Chat gpt answers all sound the same. It is toe curlingly embarrassing.

I’ve asked it loads of stuff from doing a debt snowball to stuff about slimming world, things to do with work in my house.

I use it like google and I used it to design my garden and pick paint colours for my sitting room. I use it a lot

Holiday planning; menu planning especially when entertaining someone with complex requirements; garden planning; style advice.
A lot of what I would previously asked to help with on MN before.
I’d copy and paste your OP into Chat GPT and see what comes up (apologies if already been suggested).

Last thing I used it for was to diagnose a boiler problem. It was correct.
But I regularly use it for my work emails. I ask it to make them nicer 😂. My writing style is quite blunt.
Problem with halving your workload is employers will catch on and will halve your hours/salary! I don't want it doing too much of my job!

At the moment I am asking it how to remove my banisters.

How much garden and interior design are you all doing?!?

I must be a dinosaur as I still use recipe books for Lemon Drizzle, my brain and a quick look in the fridge for a meal plan and the caravan club handbook for a bit of holiday planning 🤣🤣🤣

I use ChatGPT to help me figure out the steps I need to take for projects like painting the front door or sorting out my hair. It’s been hugely helpful because I can get overwhelmed sometimes.

It does things that Google can’t. For example, I uploaded a photo of an area of my sitting room that I wanted some suggestions for. It mocked up some fantastic ideas which I replicated and it really looks gorgeous.

People who say things like this tried it in the earlier days and haven't looked at it since. The speed of development of AI is astonishing.

it comes into its own for more complex stuff to be fair

I am not a fan of using it for things I need to keep on top of work wise as I have seen it's poor performance in certain areas and feel I would slowly stop remembering how to do things if I began to trust it, to the point I would miss errors.

I do use it for health though, particularly blood test results. I learned on here that each GP uses a lab which has markers based on the GP's demographic, so something that would be flagged as abnormal in one area won't be in another. I had a string of health issues and find the GP isn't particularly holistic when trying to figure out the root cause and many seem to be keen to only talk about one topic when AI suggests they are all linked and point to something completely different. I don't like feeling like I am wasting GP's time so I use AI now and have recently got some private tests done to see if they support what AI suggests is actually wrong.

it is a long time since i had an inaccurate result and I’m sorry I cannot believe you can google anything other than a straight forward question more quickly than AI.

Cutting through the BS and responding to coparent. Taken emotion and fear totally out of it. If that makes any sense!

Sometimes. I don’t create fiction books, more like puzzle books so I might ask for a list of wordsearch words in a certain theme eg British holidays.

I find it interesting to see how fast it has "grown" over the last 2 years, which I can see it certainly has. 2 years ago it confidently told me that taking steroids didn't make men jealous, argumentative or rage filled! Goodness knows what they gave it data input wise in the earliest days, but it does seem to be more nuanced and have a grasp of scientific data now.

Something innocuous to test it on is plants and gardening as you can see how you need to frame things so you don't get a "put it in a big pot with soil" kind of answers - you need knowledge to focus questions before you ask or it will likely give a more generic answer. So, "can I plant my wisteria in a pot?" is better phrased as "which types of soil and facing which direction will my wisteria be happiest?" for the most impactful results.

Garbage in, garbage out!

As little as I can. I use my brain instead.

It is concerning that so many people seem to forget that this tool is not an all knowing, benevolent and infallible source of information put together for the good of mankind...

It is set up and fed information by people who have agendas, bias and there is no guarantee that the data you put in it will not be shared and used for commercial purposes.

Just like you should not take what you see on X under the leadership of Elon Musk, you also should not follow ChatGPT as gospel.

AI just seems to make people dumber by the minute, lazy and no longer able to think for themselves.