How are people using AI to help with everyday life?

[Question12458]

How is your household utilising AI to your benefit? Looking for some inspo

I’ve been using ChatGPT (paid) for 2 years, this week I spoke to somebody who’s got a 2nd brain. (Collects all data from multiple sources) and is totally customised to them. Totally opened my eyes to what we can achieve

To help with meeting the diet goals for my PT. E.g. I still need to eat 25g of protein, I have 400 calories left - what can I have? - well I’ve got this in the fridge - can you adapt it? - actually my protein powders vanilla not chocolate - will it still work? Help me batch cook something for my shifts that’s high protein / fibre?

For me, it's a very useful sounding board and exceptionally patient reader with an excellent memory for detail.

Asking things like "What would a first-time reader think this book is about?" can open up an interesting and useful exploration of themes, emphasis, architecture and sequence. I use it to interrogate my own thinking, not to replace it. And the great thing is, it's never aggressive or sneery the way humans are.

Not too much use by me, but I reckon that will change over time! I'm retired so don't need it for work etc.

I do use it for trip planning and it's excellent for that, especially if going off the beaten track. For example I wanted to get to Rouen from Beauvais airport. I didn't want to go anywhere near Paris. All google etc. searches routed me through Paris together with a major trek from the main gare, change to a metro line then to another trainline and so on. I found a way from Beauvais airport with one change on a train direct from the town via Abancourt, no need to go anywhere near Paris. Perfect and half the price of the Paris route. That's where AI shines, well for me anyway. Every other search routed me from Beauvais through Paris, every single one.

I'm sure I'll use it more and more as time goes on.

It’s not the same - we all need to eat, it is a biological need, nobody needs AI. Yes, too much meat is eaten, there are too many cars on the road, etc, but AI is a brand new drain that no one actually needs to live their life. We are between a rock and hard place with cars - public transport outside of London is utterly dire, many people aren’t walking distance to basic shops/services - and some people do need meat to be healthy (my dd and I definitely do, and suspect many Northern European women of childbearing age are similar).

You do understand what books (including biographies) and librarys are don't you?

It hallucinates so I can't trust anything it says, so I don't use it as fact checking takes longer than actually doing the task and I actually want to continue to be able to use my own brain. Heard from others that it is good for coding though. It's terrible for the environment, is out-competing us for energy and water but you can get round this by using local models, run on your laptop. Bonus that you don't need to pay for it, or pay firms like OpenAI who don't have our best interests at heart and are busy making our world a worse place.

I wonder how many AI dependent people will get dementia earlier due to their brains rotting.

I use the daily reminders and they have been incredibly useful and made me more productive.

I have a Monday morning briefing for work related matters, a daily evening reminder to prepare for the next day including things like bin night, children’s activities, school ect. Friday afternoon work summary to ensure everything is completed for the weekend and scheduled for the following week, and a Sunday evening check for weekly activities & events for the family.

Can’t you just use a calendar?

So on top of interview prep/ mock interview, the best uses I've found for AI have been

Turning a job application including my personal statement that I had completed on a application portal in to a fully formatted CV by downloading the application and inputting the pdf into gemini and asking it to create a CV - it just lifted my own words and phrases out for the relevant sections. All done in 20 seconds. Proof read, couple of minor errors/ hullicinations (eg 8 GCSEs instead of 9) and all done. Amazing

DIY - I asked it to rate the difficulty of a task from 1 to 10 ( 1 being a child- 10 being a trades person), give me a list of equipement I'll need (and then discuss if certain tools i already own might be a suitable alternatives), then ask it to list all the ways I could somehow maim myself or destroy my house, and finally get it to give me a couple of youtube links. I changed the lock barrels on moving day, changed the bath/shower mixer tape, drilled holes in bathroom tiles for mounting various things etc etc.

Reflective practice - now this one is truely an improvement rather than an easy option. I free type or voice input my thoughts on incidents/jobs at work and ask it to put it into a Gibbs reflective cycle. Where it excels is the 'feelings' section and the Action plan. With the feelings it draws the positives out far more than I ever would because it's hard for a lot of people to say nice things about themself, but equally it teases out the more difficult learning points. The actions plans are just really prodcutive useful plans. Where I'm wary is the analysis, because as lots of people say - it can hallucinate and therefore everything must me fact checked.
Because it is quick and very effective I am now doing way more reflective practice than I ever have before and am learning so much and improving as a result.

I, controversially, also like it for journalling, I have never been a great journaller, and it is super useful to have feedback and the feeling of a two way conversation. It just requires a little awareness of its limitations. But is better than ruminating on a problem that in reality your friends don't want or need to hear about frequently.

Wait - you're a professional editor, and you're on here telling the world that manuscript critiques written by AI are "considerably more useful" than ones written by human editors?

Arrrghh! Please stop! If not for your own good, for the good of your fellow editors? It's bad enough for us out there already, we don't need this from one of our own ...

People will work that out for themselves soon enough, you can choose to bury your head in the sand or you can accept reality, move with the times and adapt.

So I should just give up my career instantly, without a fuss, because meh, that's reality? 💁

Is that what you would do?

Sorry! I paid for two editorial assessments, which were both useful, but found lengthy discussion with Copilot even more helpful. Probably because it's a lengthy discussion rather than a static report. Both have their place!

Oh, and edited to add: a MS critique generated by AI is not particularly great. That's not what I use it for.

Or you could be ahead of the curve finding a new role to move in to. You being stubborn won't stop AI editing.

What 'fuss' where you planning? And what are you hoping this 'fuss' will achieve?

We don’t use it. We don’t agree with it for many reasons. I’m sad that so many people think it’s ok to use it.

Fifteen more years of salaried employment. Then I can retire.

Hire human editors, people! Don't just roll over and devolve your creative partnership to the robots!

But you can involve both, as I have?

Senior well paid bods outsource their thinking and planning all the time. If AI gives more of us the luxury of someone else keeping up with our inbox and diaries and planning our day based on the priorities we give it, that's a good thing.

I suffer from over-optimising and over-optionality. It wastes my time trying for 99% when 85% would be plenty good enough. If an AI keeps me out of the detail, I don't distract myself. Could I do better? Probably. Will the incremental improvement I could add over AI actually make a difference? Often not. The times it matters I will take direct ownership of. The rest, I'll let the AI give me good enough.

Examples

We needed a new washing machine. Normally I'd end up researching and comparing prices and trying to decide if feature A or feature B is the best, or if brand C that has the great rep but you pay for it is really better than brand D that has great reviews but not well known.

This time, I told an AI my old model, asked it to fnd three well reviewed replacements that could be delivered next day, and picked one.

Is it possible there's a hidden gem out there I didn't see that would have been an been better fit? Sure. Will it make a material difference to me? No.

I've got a conference this week. The AI I use at work (company sanctioned) knows my role and what I focus on. It gave me a personalised agenda, suggested outcomes for the event and people to aim to network with. Is this the absolute optimum plan? Who knows. Is it as good a place to start as any, knowing that I can always take advantage of opportunities on the ground if they come up? Yes.

You certainly could, and you'd probably get a good result (although perhaps a more generic one than you might otherwise have had).

But will writers and publishers still want to pay for human expertise when they think they could get as good, or better, for free? Sadly I doubt it.

I'm clinging to the hope that there will eventually be an anti-AI backlash among the writing community, as the graphic designers and illustrators already seem to be experiencing.

Indeed I can and do use the internet. I could go to Trivago, but AI searches places like Trivago, Trip Advisor, Booking.com and many more places in an instant.
It's efficient and saves time.
I can say I'd like a restaurant, with a certain type of cuisine and atmosphere, that has an area to sit afterwards and not be rushed out of, or keep on getting bothered for drink orders and add in a budget.

I'm aware it's not 100% accurate, but thing like reviews are opinions and not factual in that sense. I've challenged it at times on more factual things.

I definitely wouldn't be looking at a paper map, in favour of the Internet or Google maps, not in this day and age.

AI isn't everyone's cup of tea, but it's very useful for me and saves time trawling the web.

It's a good one stop shop... but you do need to use common sense and double check certain information.

LLMs are "the kind of things people might say next in this kind of situation" machines. But most AIs now are much more than LLM. AIs have advanced hugely in just the last 6 months. Reasoning engines and semantic mappingare deeply integrated.

And while we know more about how AI works than we do human intelligence, the human brain may not be that different. The way we handle language is similar in lots of way. And a prominent school of thought in cognitive science is that the human brain is just a prediction engine. We know the mind fills in details in, for instance, eyesight to give us a full picture based on what we predict it will be when we haven't actually seen everything in our field of view. There is plenty of evidence that the brain will also fill the gaps in other ways too and some evidence that our experience of free will may just be our brains developing narrative to explain what we have done.

Love it. I use it a lot at the moment to break down my health problems. I am under a consultant its nothing serious thankfully but AI helps me to break it down and understand it better.

As I said in response to your last nasty post which thankfully got deleted by MN, people with disabilities find it helpful. Please stop picking on the content from my posts when I have clarified I suffered a stroke.

Being so pompous as to declare ‘who needs AI to…’ just shows your utter lack of empathy for those who can’t manage every day tasks that people who don’t have a disability can.

Oddly enough, I think it's the other way round: the human feedback was more generic, because an individual editor views a book through the lens of genre expectations whereas AI can offer ongoing discussion of subtle minutiae that I wouldn't expect a human reader to notice or care about as much as I do.

Human editors and AI serve very different purposes. I use AI when drafting and redrafting, to test the impact of revisions in very precise ways. A human editor is useful at the final stage, but during the creative process the semantic mapping described by @AmnesiacDream is invaluable. It's like having a beta reader that clones my own understanding of the book so that I can talk to myself about it.

Writing can be a lonely pursuit where you sometimes wonder if you're just shouting into a bucket. Being able to evaluate new/changed material within a complex framework is really exciting, and the ongoing conversation helps me to sharpen things. And you can do this at 4am, when you leap out of bed to capture another new idea, which is also handy!

I'm not taking work away from human editors, I'm just improving the quality of what I finally share with them 🌞