I’ve used it productively this week by…

• Summarising and finding relevant parts of Microsoft Teams meetings.
• Finding relevant parts of the labyrinthine policies I have to comply with.
• Quickly finding out what’s going on with corporate events in the market.
• Generating SQL code instead of starting a blank query from scratch (I can never remember the exact way to declare various structures)
• At home, feeding private documents into Ollama for insight and producing compliance reports.
• Instructions for stepping through flashing some temperature sensors.

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.

No. I have never and do not use AI in my art and never will

I would say that I have used an LLM for productive tasks unrelated to work. I run a superhero RPG weekly, and have been using Egyptian & north African myths as the origin for my monsters of the week. The LLM has taken my research and the monster-creating phase of my prep from being multiple hours to sometimes under one hour - I do confirm everything the LLM tells me with either Wikipedia or a museum. I can also use an LLM to generate exemplary images of the various monsters for my players, as a visual aid.

That means I have more time to focus on the “game” elements - like specific combats, available maps, and the like. I appreciate the acceleration it provides by being a combined natural-language search engine and summary tool. Frankly, if Ask Jeeves (aka ask(dot)com) was still good at parsing questions and providing clear results, I would be just as happy using it.

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.

GitHub Copilot for fancy find and replace at work (rewriting a database migration from the old schema to the new schema). I pasted in the old migration, started the pattern and the AI finished for me.

Search (with some double checking), rough drafting and frameworks, templates, and scripting.

Claude sonnet 3.5 and GPT 4o are good for coding

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 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

Everyday, the company I work for have all their code in SAS, I use our LLM to translate it to python. I also write my python scripts and ask the llm to refract it and optimize it. Sometimes it save me 2 seconds so I just use my code that is usually simple, but other times it saves me half an hour.

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.

I started using Debian full-time a year and half ago. It was a very frustrating experience initially and I leaned on LLMs heavily for advice. It was pretty hit or miss initially, and still occasionally gives wrong advice, but it has become much more helpful as the models have progressed. I have been able to restore a broken bup backup, learned the innards of systemd, troubleshoot scripts not launching correctly, optimized my Wayland config, correct fstab boot errors, configure my openWRT router, etc. Obviously I can just blindly copy/paste, but because I ask questions and try and tie things together, I learn along the way as well.

Currently taking a stats course and use the paid version of Claude to check/correct my workings when I do an exercise outside of the course. Also, it’s great for explaining concepts in relatable terms. For example I was having trouble understanding confidence intervals, but told Claude to explain it using Steph Curry’s 3pt shooting % as example.

There are going to be a lot of people left behind because they haven’t kept up w/ the rate of progress and still see LLMs as they were when they first launched.

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.

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.