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

Thinking two posters are the same person just because they don't agree with you is a bit 🙄
Condescending and bragging is a bit of a strange take.

Lol, you really thought you did something there, didn't you? 😂 AI makes mistakes and mixes up information all the time, which is literally something I've already explained but I suppose understanding the argument would require you to actually follow the conversation instead of desperately searching for an opportunity to sound clever. You're not nearly as witty as you think you are, and the confidence with which you keep proving that is almost impressive.

I know, WTF 😕😂

didn’t confuse you because you disagreed with me, I confused you because you’re two random strangers making equally poorly written, condescending arguments in the same conversation and frankly, neither of you are particularly memorable. I’m not obligated to keep track of every random person arguing with me on the internet and the fact that you’re trying to turn such an insignificant mix-up into some grand commentary on my intelligence is genuinely hilarious.

Oh Lordy, it was a joke, obviously!

You seem agitated so I’ll leave you to it.

I own notebooks too, that's not the brag. The brag is her acting intellectually superior because she writes her grocery lists by hand instead of typing them out on her phone as though using technology somehow makes everyone else lazy. It's not the notebooks I'm criticizing, it's the ridiculous sense of superiority she seems to get from using them.

Jokes are supposed to be funny, but off you go.

Why are you so angry @pinck? I haven’t claimed to be intellectually superior to anybody. And I’m not going to, I know I’m of average intelligence; that doesn’t worry me at all. My notebooks won’t make me any cleverer. Writing in them does me good though, certainly in terms of cognition but also relaxation- some of the studies have found evidence that handwriting aids emotional regulation and stress reduction. I hope you’re not as vexed as you sound and that you have a nice evening.

No need to be so bitchy to people.

@pinck
it takes technical knowledge and experience to use AI correctly and effectively in the first place

I think that's what many people just don't get. Relying on it to answer questions that require dynamic information, such as travel timetables, or access to information that may be missing or hidden behind data security/paywalls.

Asking something like "Explain quantum entanglement simply" is going to yield much more helpful answers than "What time does the 08:42 train arrive tomorrow?"

It's also very useful as a sounding-board. Unlike human interaction, it's neutral, well-informed, and polite (unless you ask it not to be) 😜

I use AI every day for work as I work in tech, and everyday at home.

At home, a recent thing I have used it for is to redesign our living room. With the exact dimensions and photos of the existing room, it has helped me choose colours, materials. Furniture, and source local tradespeople to help, such as refurbing the leather sofas, and made to measure curtains. And created images of what it would look like before o have committed to any purchases.

this is pro of AI because a) I would never have paid for an interior designer so it hasn’t taken work away and b) I would have ended up with store bought off the shelf curtains and so on, instead I’ve used local independent traders. And a much better result because of it.

Another pro, it’s been a really enjoyable project away from my work and family life.

Current adults may well be quite able to write an email but choose not to, but what about children who have never written an email and will never learn how because they get AI to do it for them? We are rendering a generation of young people both unemployed (because of AI taking entry level jobs) and unemployable (because they only know how to use AI and haven't learned how to think/do things for themselves.

I've used it to help put together quite lengthy objections to a huge wind farm application near my home.I needed to measure each part of it against the planning legislation and it was really useful for that, also needed to reduce it to 8000 words without losing its focus.
You really have to drill down and repeatedly question to get the right results but I've been impressed.

I love AI. For everyday life I use it to answer any questions I have and help with tasks etc. I also use it for "therapy". I have a lot of experience with therapy and it is better than many therapists. I've had a lot of great creative times making music with it too. I use Gemini

There are already plenty of things adults today can't do that our parents and certainly our grandparents could and vice versa. That's what happens when technology advances. Some skills become less necessary, new ones become more valuable and people adapt. I'd argue that the invention of the internet and its widespread adoption in the workplace was at least as significant a technological shift as AI, if not more so. It fundamentally changed how people work, communicate, access information, and conduct business. Entire industries had to adapt, some jobs disappeared, and countless new ones emerged yet somehow we didn't end up with an entire generation of people incapable of thinking for themselves simply because they could Google something instead of looking it up in an encyclopedia. Obviously, children should still learn how to write, reason, and think critically, but the idea that we're suddenly going to have an entire generation of people who literally know how to do nothing except use AI is ridiculous. People aren't going to stop learning every other skill just because AI exists. There's a difference between using technology to make your life easier and being completely incapable of functioning without it and frankly, knowing how to use emerging technology effectively is itself a valuable skill. AI isn't the first technological development to disrupt the workforce, and it certainly won't be the last.

Thankfully my teenager absolutely hates AI so when she had to write emails when applying for summer jobs she came to me for help rather than getting AI to do it for her, so now she has learnt.

A lot of younger people are really suspicious of AI. Probably because of all the endless talk of how it's going to take their jobs and because it's already started to negatively affect them by making job hunting more stressful etc. The ones I know who use it are happy to use it as a tool for some things but a lot of the uncritical hype seems to come from older people if anything.

It’s worth re-reading EM Forster’s The Machine Stops for a creepily prescient take on our direction of travel.

Very niche, but we researched a well pump to access the water down there. My DH also used it to compare several properties we were considering. Caveat, tho. My DH corrected AI a few times when it produced incorrect information about something and it thanked him! Scary. It also responded to him in Welsh and he asked why, to which it responded that his questions had been in Welsh. Reader, they had not!

A colleague requests 30 minute worksheets using certain vocabulary and produces very interesting sheets.

Been thinking that since Covid

My industry is using AI to dramatically increase productivity, and by that I mean reducing 30%+ headcount and cancelling graduate programmes, The tooling is good enough now that senior experts don't need the juniors doing grunt work previously done by the less experienced.

There is also AI monitoring sifting through mandatory call transcriptions, and any work output and producing KPI / feedback summaries. Its not always right, but is increasingly being used to inform productivity.

If its not with you yet, and you work on a computer a lot... its coming.

We have been using it for well over 2 years, it's not going anywhere

I do get that. The Industrial Revolution made life worse for an awful lot of people as well.

I've been a teacher for 30 years and the widespread cheating and outsourcing of thinking hasn't happened in my career before (previously if something looked dodgy you could paste it into Google and catch them out for copying and pasting; now you can never be 100% sure). Also, the widespread use of AI among teachers means the new crop of teachers are pretty useless as well. I spend my life correcting resources new teachers have 'created'. Brains, like everything else, are 'use it or lose it'. (Some) Students and young teachers are becoming what the tech bros call 'meat proxies'. That's why young people's IQ is going down and cognitive function in people who use AI are going down too (There's an MIT study, sorry I don't have time to find right now as my class are about to arrive).

I think the threat of AI is much more fundamental than that though. It means we can't trust anything that's put in front of us. Hannah Arendt was a philosopher who lived through Nazi Germany:

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism