With copilot included in Professional-grade Office 365 and some politician claiming that their government should use AI to be more efficient. I am curious on whether some of you did use “AI” to get some productive things done. Or if it’s still mostly a toy for you.
Really worth listening to this podcast as well. It’s a guy teaching corporate teams to make best use of AI. He goes over how to use it to get really great use by using it as a discussion rather than just asking it a question and expecting and accurate answer in the first instance
AI has been most useful for tech support for me. I wouldn’t have been able to switch to Linux completely if AI didn’t instantly find solutions for me, rather than being told by the community to read tomes of documentation.
I also use it a lot to find how to get office apps to do what I want.
I’m famous at work for being a poet, when I actually just ask AI to write a short witty poem.
You can use image generators to make nice personalised cards to share on special events.
AI can make mind maps and things like that if you tell it what you want.
- When I’m stuck in debugging and can’t think of what can go wrong, LLM chats are quite useful. I can ask for possibilities and often I find something meaningful that didn’t come to mind. These kind of things are hard to do with search engines. (If I’m debugging something unfamiliar this becomes very counterproductive though, as I can’t filter hallucinations by looking).
- A smart text formatter
- Simple bash one liner, boilerplate code generation. I tried it but non trivial/bit longer code generation again gets effectively slower as I find myself fixing/working around AI mistake quite often.
I’ve used llama3 to help me rewrite my ancient CV and gotten good results so far. I took what it suggested and changed things myself to make a bit more sense. I also use it to summarize things occasionally but that’s about it.
I wanted to update the logo for my business, I tried hiring an artist though a number I know from having working for various comic cons. No luck, so I went to friends i knew that were artists, got strung along with no results. Tried hiring via Craigslist and Reddit, got garbage.
I was out $1600 with nothing to show for it except some sketches that were no where near what I wanted. So I tried using AI. It was horrid. Anything that was half decent was cropped and unusable.
I have graphic design experience and a whole bunch of free time at work. I’d be willing to do whatever you need for free.
FYI, in the future, just use Fiverr. I had the same problems when helping my wife get her business logo created. People either wanted a ridiculous amount of money for a simple logo ($1500+ and formal contracts) or like $100-200 just for prototyping to start and then another $100-200 for final image (the latter was commonplace on the freelance artist subreddits). I went with a couple artists on Reddit and they completely missed on what she wanted, despite us providing ample examples and our own rough sketch ideas.
She ended up finding a local artist through a friend who captured the logo exactly how she pictured it, and it ended up costing around $150. Ironically, I didn’t know she did that, and I’d hit up a random artist on Fiverr who came very close to what the local artist did and it was only like $50.
Sorry for the tangent, I was just somewhat surprised at how complicated and potentially expensive getting a simple logo created. I know artists gotta eat, but some of them wanted more than what plumbers or electricians ask for, which is crazy to me.
I use it as a glorified Google search since Google search is absolute dogshit these days. But that’s about it. ChatGPT is one of the most over hyped bullshit I’ve ever seen in my life.
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It seems like exactly the moment google’s successor showed up, google has a stroke. it’s awful these days
I have it provide me with its sources
I use FastGPT on Kagi and it lists the sources for its conclusions, so it’s like a better aimed search
Copilot is actually linked directly into their search engine and it provides the links it pulls its data from.
But you’re correct, ChatGPT is not hooked into the live internet and should not be used for such things.I’m not sure if Gemini is or not since I haven’t used it or looked into it much, so I can’t comment on it.Edit: I stand corrected, ChatGPT is hooked into the live web now. It didn’t used to be and I haven’t used it in awhile since my work has our own private trained model running that we’re supposed to use instead.
That’s not correct. ChatGPT is hooked into the live web.
Ah okay, it didn’t used to be when I used it awhile back. I edited my comment, thanks for the correction.
Chatgpt also pulls from the web and cites its sources.
As if Google is any better
I use GPT in the sense of “I need to solve X problem, are there established algorithms for this?” which usually gives me a good starting point for actual searching.
Most recent use-case was judging the similarity of two strings: I had never heard of “Levenschtein distance” before, but once I had that keyword it was easy to work from there.
Also: cmake and bash boilerplate
Describing a concept and getting the term is awesome with an LLM.
I’ve found documentation and discussions of various strategies I’m considering in tech work.
I describe my idea, the LLM gives me the existing term for that strategy, and then I can find discussion, guides, and theory about that. Keeps me from reinventing the wheel.
It makes sense when you think about it too: It’s a language model, so it should be expected to do a decent job as a glorified dictionary
I think I’m going to disagree with the accuracy statement.
Yes - AIs can be famously inaccurate. But so can web pages - even reputable ones. In fact, any single source of information is insufficient to be relied upon, if accuracy is important. And today, deliberate disinformation on the internet is massive - it’s something we don’t even know the scale of because the tools to check it may be compromised. </tinfoilhat>
It takes a lot of cross-referencing to be certain of something, and most of us don’t bother if the first answer from either method ‘feels right’.
AI does get shown off when it’s stupidly wrong, which is to be expected, but the world doesn’t care when it’s correct time and again. And each iteration gets better at self-checking facts.
I use it to summarize work notes.
My work often involves talking a lot of observation notes and I used to spend a lot of time sifting through them to make the actual summaries and analyses. Now AI basically does my first draft and I can even ask it to highlight examples of different things from my notes. It honestly saves me a lot of time and effort but also proves to me that on it’s own, AI still isn’t good enough to beat a real human expert, it’s just WAY faster and gets me like 70~80% of the way there in seconds. I was at a conference just a few weeks back and found at least one other person in my field of work doing the same and a lot more people were looking to adopt it for this kind of use specifically after our discussions.
Nothing that would be proprietary, I don’t work in software or tech. And a simple find and replace all gets rid of any confidential or personal information before I paste it into any AI. Redacting and/or concealing confidential info has been a thing I’ve had to do way before AI
Search (with some double checking), rough drafting and frameworks, templates, and scripting.
I have used it as a nicer version of web search, mostly for “How do I write code using this library I’m not yet familiar with?” It provides passable tutorials when the library’s documentation is sparse (I get it) or poorly written (they tried 🤷♂️).
I use it in two ways.
ChatGPT as an interactive search. Last one was about EU GDPR compliance checklist to give a quick answer on what areas need to be looked at. I use it like once a week for work.
Productive in othen ways I use it once a month for recipes. Recipes are probably my favourite since I can say “Write it using grams and ml” and "give me some options to replace eggs and it writes out a legit recipe based on these millions of annoying blogs recipes.
Jetbrains AI auto complete for programming which is getting better slowly and I’m getting the hang of using it. It’s really good for cases where I have a common thing that I don’t remember the syntax of and I just type a name of a variable like “cspHeaderValue” and it will format thing that’s very annoying to look up based on what I some values I wrote above.
I’m not a 10x engineer now for it, it’s more like +10% overall and really depends on the task. I can see it go up to around +50% but an AI plateau might come before then.
I work in maintenance. I’ve looked some stuff up.
Its great for reading docs, I don’t have to search through to find out how to get a user’s playlists using the Spotify api
Copilot makes for a great autocomplete while programming. Saves me a ton of typing.
I find that the very best use case of LLMs are in the name it self–language. I can check my text is grammatically correct or not for example
I use it all the time, and not just for myself or for work. Yesterday I fed my son’s study guide into ChatGPT and had it create a CSV file with flash cards for Anki. It’s great at any kind of transformation / summarizing or picking out specific information.
When school sends me overly verbose messages about everything that’s going on I can feed the message into ChatGPT and have it create an ical file that has events for the important stuff that happens in school in in the coming week.
I used it to write a greeting card for my dad on his birthday (“I’m giving him X, these are his interests, give me ten suggestions for greeting cards”).
I have it explain the reasons behind news stories (by searching for previous information and relating it to the news story). I ask tons of questions about anything I wonder about in the world such as chemical processes, the differences between oil frying and air frying, finding scientific papers about specific things, how to factory reset my Bose headphones… the list goes on.
how to factory reset my Bose headphones
I don’t think it can get the information for this with 100% accuracy unless the process is same for all Bose headphones. How did it go?
and have it create an ical file that has events for the important stuff that happens in school in in the coming week.
How did this go? It can hallucinate stuff even when you post static data to it, last time I tried.
I don’t think it can get the information for this with 100% accuracy unless the process is same for all Bose headphones. How did it go?
Why not? I told it the model (Bose 700). It searched the web for information for that model, found an article that described how to do it, and provided me with the key points without having to scroll past tons of ads and noisy language. Of course it sometimes gives me the wrong info (usually because the sources are incorrect), but I’ll notice soon enough.
How did this go? It can hallucinate stuff even when you post static data to it, last time I tried.
It went perfectly. Again, there are certainly times when it makes errors / hallucinates, but I can fix those manually. In my example of producing flash cards for my son, we obviously had to proofread the cards but that’s much faster than writing all the cards by hand. One out of the 20 flash cards had a nonsensical question/answer so we just removed it.
