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.
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Pretty useful for software engineering, particularly helpful in writing a test suite, you still need to actually check the output though ofc
Also made use of it for writing my end of year review to solve the blank page problem, I find it a lot easier to edit down than starting HR stuff like that entirely from scratch
Claude sonnet 3.5 and GPT 4o are good for coding
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.
I used AI to generate random fake data to use in training on Excel , also to understand various concepts in my feild of study and to answer my sudden random questions
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.
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 have graphic design experience and a whole bunch of free time at work. I’d be willing to do whatever you need for free.
I don’t use AI for productive work, for the same reasons I don’t stir my soup with a dishrag.
Pretty good for recipes, tho’.
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It taught me the way of unix.
I used to be afraid of the terminal in linux. Now i am eager to try openbsd.
58 comments? Meh I will put this in LLM and have it summarise it in bullet points.
Used it as a toy for the longest time but by now I had to do a lot of coding and I was actually able to make good use of code completion AI.
Saved me about a quarter of my time. Definitely worth something. (FYI I use supermaven free tier).
Also I’m using ChatGPT to ask dumb questions because that way I don’t have to constantly interrupt other people. And also as a starting point to research something. I usually start with ChatGPT, then Google specific jargon and depending on the depth of the topic I will read either studies, articles or forum threads afterwards.
It did take me a long time to figure out which AI and when to use it, so mandating this onto the entire government is a gong show more than anything.
No AI is not useless, but it’s always a very specific use case.
If you’re interested, I suggest using the free ChatGPT version to ask dumb questions together with Google to get a feel for what you get. Then you can better decide if it’s worth it for you.
The amount of shit we have to clean up from devs using AI generated code nowadays is insane. Some people are using it to generate the bulk of their code and the output can be trash tier.
I was supposed to have a nice long weekend to rest and I spent most of it cleaning up after clients who pushed AI generated code into production that froze all data processing. Even after we found the problem and fixed it for them, the data didn’t catch up until yesterday afternoon. The entire holiday I had to spend with a laptop a few feet away on a Teams call because a dev used AI-gen code.
I am not saying that it isn’t helpful to your situation. What I am saying is that a growing number of outfits are starting to depend on “devs” who’s code is mostly LLM generated, and they push it without understanding what it does or how it interacts with the environment they are deploying it in.
Yeah. I think AI literacy is a real thing and should be taken seriously. Before generating everyone should internalize the boundaries and limitations of any model used.
If you have a hammer, everything’s a nail. And that reflex exists with AI as well, so everyone who uses is has to be careful in regards to that.
Same.
Gen AI is very helpful when you’re working on modifying or filling holes in code.
Much as I dislike praising AI, I must admit I got some good results using an AI powered search engine for academic articles to find sources for a term paper I’m writing for a seminar class I’m taking for my masters degree.
What’s that? Which AI powered search engine?
Messed around for a while and then nothing. Not sure if I’m being AI-averse but i really can’t find good use for it.
I use it to outline and layout big documents and reports. I give it a list of tasks I did and it writes the long-form text in the approved style. I use it anytime I need to translate my thoughts or process into corporate jargon. And occasionally my bosses ask me for a report on something totally unrelated to what we are doing and I’ll ask GPT to do the first pass on the topic and then come I’ll back and re-write it iteratively as I figure out what part of the topic the boss really cares about.
I use it all the time. I can’t imagine my work or my life without it. I need it to work as a designer. I use it to brainstorm, I use image generation for everything from moodboards to helping me with final designs. I’ve started to also program, because for a lot of tasks I don’t need a developer anymore.
I use it to help me write emails, social media posts, to translate,… I use it to ask for any trivia I’m interested in during the day. I use it for music recommendations,…
I could probably go on… But my work, my job is completely different than it was a year ago.
I have been this week, for the first time.
I’m using Hugo to design a new website and Gemini has been useful in find the actual useful documentation that I need. Much faster and more accurate than trawling the official pages, and does a better job of providing relevent examples. It’s also really good at sensing what I’m actually asking, even if I’m clumsy at the phrasing.
And for those who continue to say AI isn’t really useful for learning - another thing I’ve been using it for. “write perl to convert a string to only container lowercase, converting any non-alpha chars to dashes” - I’ve learned how to do stuff like that over and over again, but the exact syntax falls out of my head after a few months of not doing it. AI is good at providing a quick recollect. I’ve already learned perl properly (including from paper books - yes, I first wrote perl a quarter of a century ago) - and forgotten it so many times. AI doesn’t prevent me learning, just makes it faster.
