To ask what you’ve used AI for today?

[BlackBean2023]

Just today.

I’ll go first:

a critical analysis of a report I’ve written for work
a shopping list for a bbq tomorrow
To suggest planting ideas in the garden

to start a job description for me

To check if it could tell what type of Trust a Trust Deed was referring to from one paragraph. It could.

Now that would be a great development!

I haven't used it at all today and, amazingly, there are quite a few days when I manage to get on without it at all. At the moment I use it on occasion, mainly for work (once or twice a week?) and the outcome is variable in its success.

But how do you know it's right?

This made me laugh, im tempted now to try it on my dog 😂

Wording emails to difficult colleagues

I agree.

The work I do needs me to think stuff through, mull over ideas and create persuasive arguments. It's the human writing and thinking that gets to the good stuff. ChatGPT spews out bullet points in seconds that are always like the most route one basic ideas. Or sometimes just completely random invented bullshit.

A colleague asked ChatGPT to create a simple map recently and it literally made up the names of fictional London boroughs!

Maybe in a year or two, it will be different, but right now it's useless for what I would need it to do.

And don't use it for search! It's not a search engine! It doesn't care that what it tells you is true or not!

Can you expand? What did it do better than you could? What did you tell it and what came back

Not my experience with Claude whatsoever. Even free AI is available that doesn’t work like this. There absolutely is AI that can do what you’re looking for and would not be identifiable as AI.

Because I already knew. I was seeing if AI knew.

Oh so naive people!
I can guarantee that as you are all on your phones you will have used AI today.
Taken a photo? AI is used to focus and to get best lighting etc.
Done a Google (or other) search? AI
Asked Siri or Alexa? AI
Checked your weather app? AI
Looked at your news feed? AI
Online shopping? Navigation? Facebook/Instagram?
Netflix? Your health app (like step count)?
Email? Online banking? All use AI technology.
Driven your car? Unless very old model it uses AI. Sent a letter or parcel? It’s AI that reads and converts the addresses for routing.
Called customer service? AI is routing your call.
And of course AI is used in farming, logistics, shop stock monitoring, medicine, investments…
And of course, Mumsnet uses AI for data analysis.

I literally have a masters in machine learning and work with these algorithms on a daily basis. I know how they work.

It's very, very easy to spot output from a LLM, especially if you know the tone/ style the person sending you the email or document they have used AI to generate usually communicate in and even not, there is a definate AI-ness to output from these systems that is easy to spot when you know what to look for.

Plus the fact that the output is usually riddled with errors when you ask them for help with anything that isn't generic as fuck, and they are incredibly easy to fool into giving out completely incorrect information.

They aren't ready for what people think they are ready for, not yet.

Came across a limit of AI recently. I’ve been using the voice version on chat gpt plus and I asked it if it could talk me through a yin yoga workout and time the poses. It said it could.

So it suggested a first pose and said “I’m setting the timer and will let you know when the time is up”. So I got into position. Time passed. Chat gpt said nothing. After a while I realised that it must have been more than the 4 minutes promised. So I said “how long has that been?” And it said “that’s about a minute, but we can move on if you like”

Tried again a few times- same thing.

Eventually I asked it why it wasn’t telling me the time. Turns out this is beyond its capabilities- it can’t run a timer but it could say “I’m setting a timer” as that’s the right sort of thing to say 😭

Just couldn’t get started. So gave it some bullet points and it added some other relevant points, and expanded the wording into better English.
I did make some slight tweaks, but that’s much easier than when you are starting with a blank page.

i gave it, payroll analyst, experience with x system, requirements gathering, stakeholder mgt etc etc

That’s a result of idiots using AI as far as I’m concerned. If you write good prompts and know your field you can use AI to structure responses and then run through them yourself to check for errors/change the tone to your liking etc.

AI is incredibly useful for people who know what they’re talking about and know how to use it.

Of course it’s not capable of making an idiot sound like they know what they’re doing and anyone stupid enough to claim complete ownership of an AI response is definitely an idiot.

AI is a useful tool.

Which wasn't the question, being asked, of course.

It was whether people were purposefully using AI models in place of traditional googling etc.

You're very confident that AI can do what I do considering you don't know what I do.

To summarise a few different things for work (for me to then check and edit). Made a 2 hour job a 15.minute job.

Used the time saved to find an ex old friend with no online presence. I put in everything I knew about them... and it couldn't find them either 😅

Nothing

A portrait of my cat 😆

"and then run through them yourself to check for errors/change the tone to your liking etc."

This being the key, of course. In reality most people aren't doing that. Most people using AI to write their reports don't know what they are doing, don't know how to use it and definately don't check the output.

Nothing today but I used it recently to convert inches to cm for a bag to use on a flight and to find out the exact time the US sent missiles to Iran in case travel insurance was affected. Made me realise always start annual travel insurance 2 weeks before actual travel date not day before bevause airspace and terrorist cover starts 2 weeks before actual travel date

Humans are incredible!

AI is very useful
My Dad uses it all the time now I’ve introduced Gemini to him and the AI on WhatsApp. I do have ChatGPT but get by fine with other 2

Yes that’s as idiotic as good old fashioned plagiarism.

For anyone with a grain of sense about them, AI is an amazingly useful tool. I do see a lot of posts on Mumsnet saying “I can spot AI a mile away”, but the vast majority of people really can’t, when it’s been used well. There are posts on this thread that clearly show the poster is not actually familiar with using AI, but they are apparently able to spot it “a mile off”

Aye right.