Submitted 6 months ago by jeena@jemmy.jeena.net to technology@beehaw.org
I really want to use AI like llama, ChatGTP, midjourney etc. for something productive. But over the last year the only thing I found use for it was to propose places to go as a family on our Hokaido Japan journey. There were great proposals for places to go.
But perhaps you guys have some great use cases for AI in your life?
I use them mostly for
I’ve used it to make specific images for work proposals that stock sources may not have. Sometimes for fun, I vary it so it’s in the style of a cartoon or a Japanese woodcut.
I’ve been making a small album of music out of lyrics I wrote and a consistent general style/genre using suno. It’s pretty fun.
As a musician with experience recording albums, even when the songs come out basic, I can always re-record them myself and make them less generic.
I’m using Claude (subbed) to help me do qualitative coding and summarizing within a very nice academic framework. I was encouraged to try it by an LLM researcher and frankly I’m happy with the results. I am using it as a tool to assist my work, not replace it, and I’m trying to balance the bias and insights of the tool with my own position as a researcher.
On that note, if anyone has any insights or suggestions to improve prompts, tools, or check myself while I tinker, please, tell me.
I’m a bit disappointed to the practical uses, but I still get some value out of AI. I sometimes use chatgpt to tweak existing SQL scripts at work, and as a trouble shooting assistant. Also I use this tool ultimate vocal remover to extract stems from songs, mainly to make myself instrumentals to practice singing over. Those are really only things I do regularly, despite trying different self hosted AI tools. Most are cool but not very useful.
I tried using ChatGPT for making cover letters a while ago but the results were terrible, I do better just writing them myself.
It’s reducing the effort and time I have to put into some things, and I appreciate that. It’s far from perfect, but it doesn’t have to be perfect to be useful.
I’ve been using ChatGPT in conjunction with search engines just to find things I need. For instance, I did an April Fools presentation for a work meeting and needed humorous real-life legal stories, so the AI was able to provide suggestions.
I also use it to for simple tasks, like organizing info into a table.
Mainly, though, my reason for using it is that, since I work in tech, I’m going to need to know how to use it well, and the best way to do that is being hands-on.
Dank memes
For occasional chatting with Bing and translation help with DeepL.
Almost nothing. I sometimes use it to rephrase a question or answer. I refuse to become dependent on AI or contribute to it more than I already unwittingly have.
Ttrpg character art via midjourney. That’s I think the only thing I’ve ever used.
Nothing but have it write stories (not shared or used for anything but just for fun). That, and come up with names for things since I struggle with that.
Some of my common uses are:
Asking extremely niche scientific questions: I don’t depend on these answers but in the answer is usually the specific terminology I can then search and find the answers I was looking for. I have learned a lot about the properties of metals and alloys this way and what the planet could look like with different compositions.
Re-phrasing things: At work when I’m drained and out of patience I can tell that what I’m writing in my emails is not really appropriate, so I have GPT re-phrase it. GPT’s version is typically unusable of course but it kicks my brain in the direction of re-phrasing my email myself.
Brainstorming: The program has endless patience for my random story-related questions and gives me instant stupid or cliche answers. This is great for me because part of my creative process since I was a kid has been seeing in media something that was less than satisfying and my brain flying into all the ways I could have done it better. I ask the program for its opinion on my story question, say “no idiot, instead:” and what comes after is the idea I was looking for from my own mind. Sometimes by total chance it has a good suggestion, and I can work with that too.
Fun uses which are less common:
Comedy use: I once had it generating tweets from Karl Marx about smoking weed every day. The program mixed marxist philosophy and language with contemporary party music to endlessly amusing results. Having historical figures with plenty of reference material from their writings opining on various silly things is very funny to me, especially when the program makes obvious mistakes.
Language Manipulation: If some philosophical text which was written to be deliberately impenetrable is getting too annoying to read, the program is decent at translating. If I plug in a block of text written by Immanual Kant and have the program re-write it in the style of Mark Twain, the material instantly becomes significantly easier to understand. Re-writing it in the style of stereotypical gen-z is hilarious.
It's not AI, instead think of it as a search with data mined pattern matching behind a chatbot. Marketing types are so stupidly fixated they can't figure out that over hyping something can cause disappointment and enough skepticism to kill any desire to use a product. It's a lot easier to see the usefulness of something without that kind of noise.
frog@beehaw.org 6 months ago
I pretty much only use it for brainstorming ideas.