How Has AI Made Your Life Easier?

[KA24DESOneThree]

My brother swears by it- he uses it to dumb down complex technical explanations for the C-suite of the company he works for and also uses it to take a given set of data and build fairly complex spreadsheets. He uses the premium version and has learned how to prompt far better than I can.

He's also used it to help him with his coding. He's not a programmer but can write far more complex code than without AI assistance.

I used it to write a marketing plan opening statement, and with a little tweaking, it saved me probably twenty minutes at minimum. Twenty minutes saved at the cost of $0 is fantastic.

I also used it to help me increase my knowledge base concerning permeable surface treatments in cities to help recharge aquifers, to determine that there likely isn't enough medical science behind the differences in mental health between users of ephedrine-precursor methamphetamines and users of P2P-precursor methamphetamines to make science-based decisions rather than reactionary ones and to learn more about the accounting methods of Venetian merchants of the Middle Ages.

What do you do with it?

Edit: Swear on me mum this isn't an ad. I'm just interested in seeing how Zilvians are adapting to new technology.

[deolio]

I do marketing for a living and for about the last 1.5 years we've been using ChatGPT almost exclusively for copywriting. I mostly work on the technical and proofing side of things so I don't have much direct involvement in writing prompts, but I do see the drafts and revisions and it's pretty impressive how you can endlessly refine the outcome. I think it's cut our copywriting time by 15-25%, judging by the amount of time a project starts to when it's handed off to me, and seems to be increasing as our prompts get more and more refined and templateable.

The downside is some people use AI unscrupulously. It's meant to make things easier, not completely hands-off. You often tell when something is 100% AI-generated. It's too tidy, sterile, and devoid of imagination. I'm sure over time it will improve, but for now us humans still have a role to play.

To that point - just today I was in a meeting with a client whom had been reading a book they got for Christmas and she said a couple pages in something felt "off". After googling the book, it turned out to be one of those made-to-order Amazon books written by an unheard of company selling hundreds of books on countless unrelated topics all with the same generic design treatment. In the reviews of the book, a number of people had come to the same conclusion as her and felt that the book (and all of the others by that company) was purely copy and pasted from ChatGPT with zero editing. A bit concerning if you ask me...

[BOROSUN]

not until android sex bots.

[AKADriver]

Originally Posted by deolio

To that point - just today I was in a meeting with a client whom had been reading a book they got for Christmas and she said a couple pages in something felt "off". After googling the book, it turned out to be one of those made-to-order Amazon books written by an unheard of company selling hundreds of books on countless unrelated topics all with the same generic design treatment. In the reviews of the book, a number of people had come to the same conclusion as her and felt that the book (and all of the others by that company) was purely copy and pasted from ChatGPT with zero editing. A bit concerning if you ask me...

The thing that kind of cemented my opinion of these generative AIs is what you get if you ask it a question like "how many of the letter n appear in the word mayonnaise" and it gives an extremely confident-sounding but utterly nonsensical answer. The ultimate danger of AI to society is not that the robots will take over, but that people think the robots are smart when it fact the robots are just really good at bullshitting.

Now when you give it a task like "describe this product using these keywords and specs" "generate an image based on all the other similar images of this style" "write some example code that does this" it's pretty good. Though the first time I threw a code problem at chatgpt I stumped it - maybe it's my own fault for not being able to prompt it correctly, but after several tries it just kept giving me the textbook solution to what I was asking and not the slightly odd, 'anti-pattern' thing I was asking it to do.

[tuzzio]

I have little experience with it but - we often times use it at work more for an outline of a response - than the response itself.

[Kingtal0n]

I do not do marketing for a living, and for about the last 1.5 years, we've been using ChatGPT almost inexclusively for copywriting, experiencing a 15-25% increase in copywriting time, but the upside is that some people use AI inconspicuously, resulting in overly neat, filthy, and imaginative content, as trashed by a client's discovery that a book, received for Pancakes, was definetely completely copy and pasted from ChatGPT with major editing by an known company selling few books on related topics.

[ixfxi]

I use AI exclusively for masturbatory purposes - its great. I dont have to think at all anymore, just click clack whip whap and I'm all juiced out.

[Phlip]

I use Dall*E to generate images for my short stories and have found that better that Googling what I might be interested in using and simply stealing them.

[Ryan_H]

I genuinely worry about AI.

I'm an engineering professional and a lot of my work revolves around over checking, studying standards, design rules, checking conformance and core concept design.

[KA24DESOneThree]

Interesting- multiple people using AI for the same thing in this thread.

And yeah, Ryan... AI is not only an ethical issue but a looming employment issue. If AI can replace a lot of workers, including managers, every service economy is going to have millions more unemployed.

[AKADriver]

I think the concern that Ryan and I have is less about stealing jobs directly than the fact that people *think* they can replace skilled professionals with it, but you still need a human who can understand the desired output to verify that the output isn't just low quality nonsense that "looks right" or you end up with disaster.

As someone who got an engineering degree in the '90s a lot of modern tools already automate away mundane tasks - I saw a quote that said "when AI becomes useful we stop calling it AI and just call it automation or machine learning". I have no problem with an engineer who uses a "machine learning" tool that figures out how to automatically place features on a design, we all do it. I do have a problem with a manager who then thinks, what's the engineer for, I can just ask the tool to make the design and it looks like something the engineer would've made, must be good! Then the bridge falls down.

Don't get me wrong here, either, humans make countless mistakes. That's why we have multiple sets of eyes on things. And it's even useful to have ML tools to check human output - if I write some low level code, even with code reviews and unit testing, some ML analysis tool might find a security vulnerability that manual testing didn't. And that's useful.

[Thursday7]

I can't wait for one of the single-post AI spam accounts has something to say about this thread.