AI's increasing relevance in daily life

According to a new survey published by The Economist, AI is now better than humans at convincing conspiracy theorists to stop believing nonsense. Have a look at their instagram post:

I find myself using AI more and more each week, for help with both personal and professional matters. With this week’s newsletter, I thought I’d share some of the use cases that I’ve been using repeatedly lately.

As a side note, if you’re using AI for other tasks as well, I’d love to hear about it. Feel free to reply to this newsletter to share your own use cases.

Here are some of mine:

1. Getting help with a tool I’m using.

This is especially relevant for developers who need to figure out how to do a specific thing with code, but not only.

If you’re using any tool that has a lot of complexity to it, chances are that an AI chatbot like ChatGPT will be able to help you figure out why it isn’t acting the way you expect, how to troubleshoot or how to do a specific thing.

Case in point, I do 3D modelling as a hobby, and although I’ve had this hobby for many years and learned a lot, there’s still occasionally something I get stuck on, forget, or just doesn’t work the way I expect and I can’t figure out why.

Normally, to solve my problems I’d have to look for other people who had the same issue on forums, or look at YouTube video or just search the web. This is time consuming and you don’t always get the answer you’re looking for.

ChatGPT has been a really great troubleshooting assistant in those cases and helped me save lots of time with issues and such.

2. Demystifying things that I’m confused about.

Here’s one of many examples:

I happened to be in Cannes a few weeks ago looking at the many people who were out windsurfing at the beach, wondering what it would cost to get into that sport. So naturally I started looking at windsurfing equipment online (I don’t live near the sea).

That was really confusing. I was finding boards of many different sizes and specs that meant nothing to me, sails of different sizes and a bunch of stuff that I couldn’t even tell what they were for.

And nothing came as a kit, so I needed to actually know what I’m looking for in order to piece it all together.

All I had to do was ask ChatGPT to explain what equipment I need for windsurfing and voila! I quickly learned about every bit of gear that I definitely shouldn’t buy because again, I don’t live near the sea.

3. Learning Spanish

I do one hour of Spanish with a tutor each week, which is not nearly enough for me to get to a point where I can comfortably have a conversation with a local anytime soon (and that’s my goal).

My tutor recommended that I read things in Spanish and listen to Spanish regularly. What I do now is I occasionally ask ChatGPT to translate an answer it gave me about something to Spanish, so that I can read in Spanish more regularly while also knowing what the sentences mean (because I already read them in English).

4. Helping me with concept art.

Again, I do 3D modelling as a hobby and modelling often turns out best when you are working from references and have a very good idea about what you want your model to look like.

Normally, I would start by looking for references online, then draw a very rough sketch of what I want to make and then get to work. But although I think I’m okay with modelling and sculpting, I’m pretty bad at sketching.

Asking ChatGPT or Midjourney to generate concepts based on my guidelines can be a great way to quickly see some iterations of different directions in which I could take my models. That gives me many options from which I can extract elements that I like.

Separately (and you may have noticed), I’m also now using it to generate headers for my newsletter (web version only).

5. Research for content.

I occasionally use ChatGPT when writing content if I am looking for references, statistics or particular kinds of information that I think would aid or strengthen my content in a particular way.

It’s also been helpful in situations where, for instance, I remember I read an article once and would like to quote it, but I don’t remember where I read it.

ChatGPT was sometimes able to help me find old articles which I couldn’t find myself on Google, by performing a search based on what I remembered about the article.

6. Rewriting long and difficult sentences.

For ages, I have been using a tool called Hemingway Editor to improve the readability of my writing.

I paste in my content in the tool and it grades each sentence based on how easy or difficult it is to read. If it’s a difficult sentence, it highlights it in red or yellow, prompting me to simplify it. But now that they’ve also integrated AI with their tool, I don’t need to think about how to simplify it.

I can just ask the AI to do it. Its suggestions don’t always work but it still saves me lots of time.

7. Recipe ideas based on what’s in the fridge.

Okay, this is actually how my wife used it a few times but it’s a really cool idea so I wanted to include it.

If you have leftovers or too much of something in the fridge and want to “get rid of it”, you can ask ChatGPT for ideas on what you can make with that. And it can generate pretty useful results.

8. Medical information.

I intentionally chose the words medical information and not medical advice for obvious reasons, but most people (like me) don’t have a doctor on speed dial. Whenever anything is even slightly off with myself or someone close to me, I quickly become very curious to figure out what it might be.

Google is not my friend in those situations.

I tend to find links with all of the worst case scenarios and it usually leads down a bit of a rabbit hole. Not helpful.

ChatGPT in my experience so far is a lot more level-headed and highlights not just the horrible, but also the far more likely minor factors that could be causing my finger to hurt unexpectedly.

There are others but those are some of the more repetitive use cases that I’ve been finding AI to be quite helpful with personally. What are some of yours?

Until next week,

Cata