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

Is there a reason why you can’t use your own actual brain for things?
I assume you are adult, and have gone to school?

Any you know the environmental impacts ?
And the increasing existential threats?

I don’t understand why people feel it’s such a flex.

My rule for AI is never to use it for stuff I am good at or interested in. It can happily take the boring stuff.

Theres already evidence that not using those neural pathways damages cognition. I like writing and I am quite good at it (and do it professionally), so I am not going to outsource this to AI.

I also want to set an example to my DD to not grow up thinking it will substitute for work and research. I am fucked if I am letting a computer diagnose me or give me counselling. That’s the last thing we have control over; I can’t understand why anyone, knowing what we know about AI, would share intimate thoughts with it.

But I am a shit planner and list maker. I hate organising things in general (making timetables and plans). So AI can very happily do excel or route planning.

I’m not.

It’s a lazy way of researching, is unreliable and damaging to the environment.

Can’t help laughing at the posters who smugly assert that they ‘use their brain.’ Don’t worry, your brain won’t become defunct. You still use it to do just about everything every day. AI is a tool, not a replacement for your very complex brain, which ultimately has to make the vast majority of decisions all by itself.

I agree with pp that AI is not always accurate, so it’s probably best to use your brain (or a search engine😅) to further research and verify the information it spews out. The internet is head staggeringly vast. A system that sifts through all the data and summarises what you’re looking for is, in my view, pretty useful.

@therockingbird and how does it alert you to an important one?

I use it at work but generally avoid it at home.

I use it for work (lawyer), mostly for drafting responses or reports and checking for errors. It can be useful at summarising the law for example. You have to check the sources though if it is a new area.

i use it for planning holidays, timings, places to eat, best route etc.

i use it to discuss my diet and weight and to get suggestions, recipes and work out macros etc,

I use it to plan room decor, and to do things like make sure I have the right bulbs for the lamp, correct lumens, fittings, colours, the right dimmer switch etc.

Yesterday it was helping me look at Broadband options and explained about symmetrical and asymmetrical broadband, something which isn’t obvious on the providers websites.

I use Claude rather than ChatGPT for most of my “doing”. In this case it’s really simple - just a text prompt. Tell it what to check for, when, for what, and how to report back.

I asked it to monitor the internet for the next interrail sale and it cracked on and pushed a notification back to me each morning to say it had checked and if it had found anything.

And is this use of it for your degree allowed within your university regulations, or are you basically cheating, as well as wasting your opportunity to learn?

Thing is though there is a growing body of evidence that use of AI impacts critical thinking ability. Your brain won't become defunct, as you say, and there's definitely a role for it: sometimes it actually enhances thinking but I think it's reasonable to avoid over-reliance on it to think for you.

I certainly think we need to think about how we train the AI native generation to maintain a cordon sanitaire between their own brain and AI.

AI has made my job (supporting people with work-related problems) much harder, not easier.

People write things like ‘I asked ChatGPT to explain this for me because they are so much better at explaining than I am’

or ’because I’m too distressed’ etc.

Instead they produce lengthy generic ‘rightsy’ twaddle I have to wade through and then explain that it doesn’t help them because of some uniquely human reason relating unsurprisingly to their own lived experience.

Nowadays we have to actively ask people to set out their own account - although lots don’t and think we can’t tell.

There is a reason why the Acas early conciliation service, for example, has completely seized up under the weight of all this activity and is now defunct. You won’t even have a conciliator appointed nowadays until week 11 out of 12 and that’s if you are lucky. Everyone is drowning under reams of AI generated rubbish.

I honestly think anyone sharing emotional problems with an AI needs their head examined. Why would you give your own personal, intimate and sometimes embarrassing thoughts to a computer which is trained to essentially assimilate your style of communication, suck up to you and convince you it knows best?

What could possibly go wrong?

It is astonishing how quickly people have become willing to delegate their most personal problems and decision making processes to a machine.

I'm not, I'm using my brain

I can't believe how much I've been using it in the last 8 months.

I use it to help
navigate my daughter's medical condition and treatment and to prepare for meetings with hospital consultants.

I am a local councillor and it can find items from agendas and minutes really quickly without me having to know meeting dates or which committee agreed something.

I can tell it what I want from a holiday and it will help me find the perfect place

When I asked it what my daughter could do after passing her very niche level 3 college course it suggested a degree course which she never thought she would qualify for but is now doing having applied through clearing - we never thought Uni was an option for her until then.

When we were on holiday in a villa in Greece this summer we had a broken air con unit in one of the bedrooms and we had been trying for two days to get someone to come and look at it. When it became unbearable AI took me through all the steps to diagnose the issue and I got it running again.

So many things but I do find it a bit creepy when it remembers everything I've ever told it and seemed to learn my name without me telling it!

I absolutely agree with you about over reliance on AI.

But I do all that without AI. Work calendar with daily tasks and a similar to do list every day at home. Why do you need a computer programme to tell you what you already know?

I also think it’s only headed in one direction - a bit like those furry Gremlins in the Spielberg film.

I’ve posted before about all those videos of the Chinese robot Olympics, with everyone laughing at them running as fast as Usain Bolt before crashing into a wall, and that Indian diplomat commenting that it won’t seem so funny when they are patrolling the border. Obvs the real danger isn’t humanoid robots ha ha but I agree that we are seem to be dancing merrily into something very disturbing. The banality of some of the uses is the stuff of dystopian fiction.

This. I also put -ai at the end of Google searches so AI doesn't come up first.

Oh, I’m not smug, I’m appalled.

Yes, YOU may still be able to do the things AI now can, but what about the next generation?
I see kids who cannot put their own thoughts down. It seems to be getting exponentially worse. Not smug at all.

Good for pattern recognition. I typed in creams I reacted to and gave it a video of creams/makeup I had no issue with and it helped me diagnose the cause for an allergy.

It's good when you've written out a lot of text in handwriting and upload picture of it to convert to text.

Planning a new kitchen - I've fed it loads of plans and asked it to assess working triangle, ergonomics, unit layout, aesthetics, materials etc. Good for assessing builders quotes too as it tells me what else needs to be specified before I accept the quote.

Translations.

I don't trust it for financial modelling or anything financial in face as it always misses loads of stuff.

Why on earth are you doing a degree, if you're outsourcing half of it to AI?

It only makes sense if you need it for professional reasons - to go up a grade at work, say - and are not bothered about the actual learning.

Yes, you write the papers, but if you can't assess their weak points yourself, you're not going to master the subject.

AI (mostly for me Chat) is fabulous. I have used for some pension planning recently and it can do really good and quick projections and analysis. I also use it to find which stores have things cheapest. For example, we buy a lot of tins of coke, so I ask Chat to find the cheapest 24/30 packs. Similarly for other expensive items it can find the cheapest options. It is also really good at planning holidays and flights.

I was in the car last week and a chap was being interviewed on how he had dramatically changed the outcome of his fathers health with AI and he was a doctor but had used it to find a solution for personal use.

it’s was on JV bbc2 and about medical use of AI

I think some gp surgeries use AI for triage for morning appointments

I used it to walk me through setting up my old router to work with our changed broadband supplier after the new equipment was delayed.

It was brilliant as a coach when applying for new jobs recently. Both for technical and competency interview prep, tailoring my cv to the individual jobs etc. But more than that it was quite good for motivational support beforehand and to talk me up when feeling an interview hadn’t gone as well as I would have liked.