To ask what you use ChatGPT for?

[OhWhatsTheBloodyPoint]

I may be late to the party, but recently discovered it and wonder what others use it for?

Any situation where I need bland generalisations that I can't be bothered to formulate on my own.

This can be said about literally everything. I'm assuming by this comment you grow your own produce and dont buy mass produced from stores, and you dont use Google or have sm

Follow-on question: What are you doing to compensate for the environmental impact of your use of A1?

I can't bring myself to use it. When brainstorming about how to generate a bespoke backdrop image to be projected during our school play a few weeks ago, my TA suggested putting some prompts into ChatGPT. One boy quietly got up, went over to the sink and half filled a cup of water. He brought it to me and said: "Please don't do it, it'll use about this much water. Think about all the people using it all the time. Let's not make it worse." I could have hugged him.

There's recent evidence that people who do understand it use it less. hbr.org/2025/07/why-understanding-ai-doesnt-necessarily-lead-people-to-embrace-it

I don’t use it tons, but I do occasionally use it for things where googling would likely require me to look in lots of different places. I used it to compare 2 different car seats based on set criteria but for example it told me that there were no ADAC scores for the seat I was looking at and gave me scores from a similar seat. Now I knew it had been tested so asked it to look again - but that is typical of the kind of errors it makes. I never rely on it to tell me new things or without checking as I have seen it get things wrong so often.

This

This. I like to use my brain, I don’t want to outsource thinking. And when you think of the environmental cost of GAI and LLM, it’s horrifying to see the trivial things people are using it for.

Food is necessary. We all managed perfectly well without genAI until 2 years ago. HTH.

BTW I would also encourage people concerned about the environment to switch from Google to Ecosia, which is solar powered and runs a tree planting programme.

But he was fine with wasting that cup of water?

Things that didn’t happen…

Do you drive? Boil a kettle? Stream videos? Eat burgers? All of these use a lot more.

How exactly is asking for book or recipe recommendations outsourcing thinking?

A saying which connects us to our forefathers like no other.

We managed perfectly well without the internet.

We managed perfectly well without TV.

We managed perfectly well without the radio.

We managed perfectly well without flushing toilets.

We managed perfectly well without telephones.

We managed perfectly well without steam engines.

We managed perfectly well without clocks.

We managed perfectly well without paper.

We managed perfectly well without wheels.

We managed perfectly well without fire.

Aye, sure.

Everything! Always remember, a AI is only asgood as the question asked, if you structure your questions poorly, you'll get rubbish answers, so think about your questions properly but also remember a computer is only as good as the info put in it so know it's limitations.

@No3392 and @MyWarmOchreHare

Wtf?! Troll-hunting is bad form, you know.

It absolutely, totally, 100% happened! How cynical to think it didn't. Do you know any 10 and 11-year olds? The ones I teach really care about the environmental impact of the decisions we all make -it's part of the curriculum.

As it happens, no water was wasted: we were in the middle of a heatwave, remember, the classroom thermometer showing 30°C. He chugged it down and that was that.

And what's more, my pupils also know how to find their way around hypocrisy traps like that one, MyWarmOchreHare (we debate things like this in English), and not feel 'called out' if someone tries to make out that their concerns are unfounded or their efforts in vain. We all do some things which have a negative environmental impact some of the time. But it doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to limit our impact where we can. Personally, I'm lucky that I've been able to set up my lifestyle in such a way that I don't have to drive, stream, eat meat, travel abroad or buy 'new' clothing, technology or furnishings, but I hold my hands up to boiling a kettle a few times a day.

And browsing the internet? Five minutes of which uses as much energy as a ChatGPT search.

Why is it that you can bring yourself to browse the net and boil the kettle but not use ChatGPT?

Of course we should be aware of our energy consumption, but we don’t ask everybody who makes a coffee what they plan to do to mitigate the energy it’s used, and nor do we have kids presenting us with glasses of water, Oliver Twist style, and begging us not to let them on the internet for five minutes. Whoever is teaching him this is doing him no favours. AI will be a major part of his life. He does need taught how to use it.

Which is what I'm saying before saying its shit I wont use it make an informed decision.

@MyWarmOchreHare AI will be a major part of our DC's lives and this boy is right to be thinking of responsible ways of using it. He realised that using AI to generate a unique image of a moonlit woodland glade with a mysterious well would be unnecessary: we could either create it ourselves by traditional means such as painting and drawing or find a pre-existing picture online, without the need to waste energy on AI originality. His classmates agreed with him and no one suggested he was silly or hypocritical because he has a phone or was driven to school by his mum or whatever.
Nobody is not teaching him how to use it -they're kids and by definition all over new technology.

When I’m writing and overuse a word and can’t of any other words or phrases to replace it, it’s great to help with that.

I ask it a lot of basic facts or statistics. Sometimes I just think of things and don’t want to spend ages seeking out the answer so it just feeds the answer back instantly and satisfies my knowledge (I love random facts)

My mum has recently found out about it and where she has multiple health issues, she can only eat specific foods. So it’s been great for her to get recipes and just generally be a bit more educated on why she can’t eat specific foods because of her diabetes etc.

Silly things like when my mum sent me a recipe and it wasn’t in the measurement I needed so I uploaded the photo and asked for the cups to be converted to grams/ml and it done it instantly. It saved so much time for me rather than having to go onto Google and typing ‘convert 3 cups of chia seeds to ml’ for 10 ingredients instead of one step of asking chat gpt

Writing complaint or compliment letters, other than that just utter nonsense between my friend and I (such as fake lawyers letters to her cat to ask for a paternity test for my kittens) sheer nonsense 😆

I tried it. It was shit. I've read a ton on the ethical issues. I've had my books scraped to feed it without permission or payment. I've read about the racist zoning of data centres and the public health issues they cause. I've read about the abusive labour practices inflicted on the ghost workers who tag the data for pennies. I've read about the energy and water usage. I've read about the impact on student performance. I've read about the potential for misinformation. I've read about how bad actors like Musk use it to shape public opinion. I've read about how leaving it in private hands is a huge risk for freedom of information. Thinking it is shit is an informed decision.

What is the difference between taking five minutes to find a pre-existing one online, and asking ChatGPT to create it, in terms of energy? Nothing. So why is one okay and not the other?

Good we should all be informed and make decisions based on that 😁

Why this dogged insistence that AI is only marginally worse than regular browsing (a kind of wilfully disingenuous assertion of false equivalence)?

Take a moment to read some posts on this thread detailing examples of AI use which, with the best will in the world, is not comparative to Googling: ChatGPT creating bespoke, personalised plans, schedules, price comparisons, designs, memes, recipes, photo edits and letters etc based on individual prompts and instructions; things which, in addition to -in many cases- not being strictly necessary, could actually be done by people themselves.

I suspect I have ASD and I don't say that flippantly as I have 3 nd kids.

I use it to sanity check socail interactions that confuse me

Because it is only marginally worse. Five minutes spent browsing is as damaging as one AI request. So what is the problem if people want to get something bespoke produced for them instead of scouring the internet doing it themselves?

I suspect the environmental issues are not at all your concern and you just think it’s a moral failing and people are being lazy to take the option of making their lives easier.