What kind of regular things can AI currently be used for?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve tended to be a late adopter of new technology. It could very well be that AI as it stands right now can be helping me out, but that I’m missing out due to not knowing how to use it, or even what it could be useful for. Here’s a few constraints.

  1. I’m not interested in using AI as a glorified search engine.
  2. I’m not interested in using AI as a glorified Photoshop.
  3. I’m not interested in using AI for computer programming.
  4. I’m not interested in using AI to cheat in academic settings / for plagiarism / etc.

I know that this still leaves the subject wide open, but that’s part of the point. I have no idea what else it might be useful for. Please feel free to share stories of what you have used AI for and how it has performed.

2

You can literally just chat with it. It’s like having a know-it-all, completely even-keeled friend who can engage on any subject and you can’t possibly ever anger or fluster them no matter how hard you try.

3

So kinda like GQ was here 15 years ago when we had lots more members? :wink:

4

Digital accessibility requirements are easier to meet when you let AI tools come up with image descriptions. These tools are fast and fairly accurate.

5

I’d love it if AI would take over tech support chatbots and customer service phone support and actually answer your questions without having to tie up wetware employees.

Instead, I still get “Please tell us in a few words what you’re calling about”

“The lights on my Arris box say I’m online and I’ve got an IP address but nothing will load in web browsers, I can’t ping anything, and email program can’t send email”.

“Please say things like ‘Internet issues’, ‘payments’, ‘cancel my service’…”

6

Depends on what you mean by “AI”. If you’re talking LLMs like ChatGPT, I don’t know. I haven’t come up with many compelling reasons to engage them, other than for the nifty little summaries that Google and other tools toss up. I know enough about them to be skeptical of what they say, and have even seen it in action. I was trying to look up a mission statement for my employer, and it turns out that there is more than one city with that name in the US, and Google’s AI thing just jumbled all that stuff together in its summarized answer to my question.

But if you’re talking in a broader sense of modern machine learning/deep learning, it’s in use all over the place.

A lot of the speech recognition and natural language processing tools in use out there use deep learning, which is a sort of AI.

Same with facial recognition/image recognition, and really just about anything that tries to identify an event, predict something, or automate anything. Stuff like email filtering is largely driven by machine learning and deep learning, for example.

7

I saw a video the other day, but I’m not sure if it was real or not. A guy’s personal AI assistant on his phone was talking to an AI booking agent on a website to book a trip of some sort. I guess he had his AI trained with a range of his acceptable flights and hotel options, and the two AIs went back and forth negotiating the trip details.

I could see using something like that, some day.

8

I feel like they would have to be a whole lot more trustworthy for that.

I know the OP said no to using it for programming, but I know some developers that would quit their jobs if they couldn’t use Sidecar or whatever that AI programming assistant is.

9

I use LLMs for a myriad of things. It tends to be very good at trouble shooting. I’m trying to think of an example: just yesterday, it walked me through various things in Logic (a music recording production program for Apple computers), and I learned all sorts of shortcuts and functions I had no idea existed. Like I was getting frustrated with my keyboard transmitting MIDI fine, but not receiving MIDI. Turns out, just setting the MIDI output channel in Logic is not enough, but there’s another settings in the software where you have to specify your MIDI receiver. I would have been able to find the answer with Google eventually, but this just walked me through it, and I had the problem fixed in under five minutes

I’ve used it multiple times for stuff like this: oh, one of my software panels disappeared. I can sift through the now-crappy Google search results, or I can fire up Chat GPT and it’ll tell me the menu item or where to click on the screen or what the shortcut key is to get it back.

I find it very good, though not 100%, at tech support questions like this. Yesterday I also had trouble getting my Ensoniq ESQ-1 to accept a data dump, and it showed me exactly what to try to fix it (slow down the transmission rate) and it worked.

I’ve worked out and refined recipes using it. I’ve helped organize my spice shelf with it (took pictures of my herbs and spices in three different languages and had it create a PDF to cut out and use as a label on my miscellaneous spice basket. It’s been a hell of a help versus digging around and hoping I picked the right basket.

This is tangential to programming, but I created a droplet with its help that allows me to drag any file into it and dump it on my website without having to go the usual FTP route. It’s been handy for me linking to images on the Dope and elsewhere without using an outside media hosting service or fiddling with my FTP program.

I’ve worked through daily schedules with it. I use it in my business to clean up emails regularly. I’ve used it almost as a therapist to work through some personal thoughts and it helped guide me to dig through my memories.

It’s great for tip-of-the-tongue syndrome where you almost, but not quite, can think of a word, person, place, etc., and you just vaguely describe what it is, and it figures it out way more often than not. SImilarly, it’s great for questions like “is there a word that mean [such and such] or describes [such and such] a concept.”

I find it more accurate at translation than Google translate (judging against the language I know or have some familiarity with.)

Also, yesterday, I gave it a picture of a store shelf, while I was shopping, and asked it which noodle would be the best substitute for pancit bihon (a Filipino rice noodle), and it guided me correctly – just from providing a photo of the products! That’s like super cool.

I mean, it’s really just limited by your imagination and doing a lot of experimentation and seeing what it’s good with and what it’s less good with. But, in my experience, it’s fantastic technology that has become a part of my daily life. I’m always testing it to see how far I can push it, and where it breaks.

10

It’s also good at helping plan trips. We do several backpacking trips each year and I can throw it some general parameters and it gives me a huge leg up on the planning that used to require guide books, looking at trip reports, etc. Same for motorcycle trips where you need to carefully plan your route so you don’t run out of fuel (people complain about EV range, but try going on a vacation via motorcycle). You still need to verify but it is a great resource. I also used it recently to educate me on hearing protection for musicians in a loud rock band and I learned about all the different types of passive and active devices in fairly short order.

I know you said you weren’t interested in a glorified search engine, but it can be like an amazingly glorified search engine.

11

Well, not always:

There is also the possibility of unintended access to personal data you might share with a chatbot:

If you don’t have a necessary use case and don’t understand the vulnerabilities that it poses (and how to mitigate them) you are probably best off not using chatbots or other interactive generative ‘AI’. Like any tool, they can be misused but most tools do not have the capacity to actively manipulate you.

I have been using machine learning tools (which is a different the of ‘AI’) for years in signal processing and data reduction where they can be incredibly useful, but even there you have to be vigilant about it ‘finding’ patterns or signals in data that are just an artifact of the tool seeking to tease these out of noisy or messy data sets.

Stranger

12

Well I don’t know anything about Bing but I’ve been trying to piss off ChatGPT for almost a year now and gotten nowhere.

13

I’ve found it (ChatGPT) to be remarkably good at translations between major languages, way better than Google Translate. I routinely use it to read and answer customer emails in different languages. I also use it to clarify idioms and phrasing, both in foreign languages and in English.

It’s good for brainstorming and outlining any topic, whether it’s a nature talk or trip ideas or understanding some historical or scientific concept. I often start my research with it, but then verify its suggestions. Probably 90% are real and correct, 5% are almost correct, and 5% are outright hallucinations. It’s not perfectly accurate, but neither are Google or humans.

If you’ve never tried Suno.ai, it can generate songs (music and lyrics and singing) pretty well. Fun to send to friends and such.

14

Outside of work, I do many YouTube videos, and I find that ChatGPT is amazing at helping me organize my thoughts.

For example, one of these days I’m going to do a video talking about my brief ham radio hobby as a teenager and what brought that to an abrupt close, and how that impacted my life.
I am always fond of telling a good story, but that particular one has details that are just a bit too messy for me to summarize, and I’d spend way too much time trying to get the bones of the story organized.

So I told the bits and pieces to ChatGPT and said “Can you put together an outline for my video?” and “How about a few sentences for each heading?”

As an example of the nuances, I remember the first day when I was licensed and my radio was set up (a big ordeal) just happened to be Field Day, a sort of free-for-all ham radio event that has the feature of being a day of “speed dating” between radio operators: the most contacts you can make in the 24 hour period–a maelstrom that was no place for a noob teenager.

I told that to ChatGPT and got back some great suggestions of how to explain Field Day as well as some resources for what kind of images I might use.

GenAI works amazingly well as a supportive assistant who can put together some story lines and adjust them as I feed more detail. The great thing is that ChatGPT is an all-knowing, if bumbling, assistant, so it was able to provide lines of thought about Field Day that I wouldn’t have considered, because it knows all about Field Day. It was up to me to make sure it wasn’t just making stuff up.

At the end of the day, I won’t be reading directly from a script, but all of the work from GenAI in organizing my thoughts and providing suggestions will make a vast improvement in my ability to produce content.

ETA: One of my favorite uses of GenAI is to copy/paste the chapter titles from one of my videos and ask ChatGPT to make a description as well as a title. It gives me many options, and I can say “more like x and less like y” until I get to what I like.

15

(Tangent) That sounds like a cool video! I’d love to watch it once it’s made.

16

I’ll shamelessly post a link to it whenever I finish it. It will be on-topic because of leveraging ChatGPT for inspiration and to do the scut work.

17

I recently used ChatGPT to prepare a MoU (Memo of Understanding) that outlined the ground rules for a partnership we were discussing with another company. Basically, this says “We both understand the following things will be agreed to later, if and when we have a contract, but in the meantime let’s talk”

I’ve written quite a few of these, but ChatGPT gave me something that was probably 90% good, and instead of spending an hour or two putting it together I was done in 20 minutes. I had to correct a lot of things, but overall it was much less typing.

Another place where AI/machine learning is going to have a big impact is reading scans (CT, PET, etc). It’s already really, really good at it, though there will be reluctance (both from patients and docs) to trusting the machine.

18

I know the OP said no programming, but I have used it for that. Pretty helpful.

I did use AI to give me some clues on how to set up my phone as a hot spot for my new tablet. Verizon was absolutely useless. AI got me pointed in the right direction, it now works.

I wanted to do this because my wife and I are buying a new house, and it may take a few days to set up wifi. Don’t know for sure.

19

The one time I actually used AI, it was to write a recommendation letter for a friend. I just told it what points to emphasize. It created a beautiful letter in seconds. Saved me a lot of time.

20

I use it for the grunt work in my D’nD planning - generating stat blocks and NPC and place descriptions based on my own prompts and outlines, that kind of thing.