How often do you use AI? [i.e. ChatGPT / Grok]

How often do you use AI?

  • Every Day

  • A few times a week

  • Never

  • What is A.I.?


Results are only viewable after voting.
Completely agree on the DIY expansion due to YT and now AI. It's incredible how much more I can do for myself due to these resources.

As far as the value of "old timers", many of them (including me) are making crap up as they go and passing it off as fact. The value of human experience is still valuable in many areas but information gatekeeping is not one of them.
 
Completely agree on the DIY expansion due to YT and now AI. It's incredible how much more I can do for myself due to these resources.

As far as the value of "old timers", many of them (including me) are making crap up as they go and passing it off as fact. The value of human experience is still valuable in many areas but information gatekeeping is not one of them.
Right. The problem is when the AI or internet is not available your average person won’t be capable of figuring anything out on their own. If the human mind is nursed on artificial “milk” it won’t know how to find food for itself when its digital mother is unavailable.

Worst case scenario, we become absolutely dependent on AI and China or some other adversary of the US takes down our internet and we’re all screwed because no one knows how to do anything anymore without asking AI. The smart phone has already shown this pattern. Take away someone’s phone calculator and then ask them to do some basic mental math. Ask someone to drive without a navigation system and they can’t navigate on their own. People don’t even have a road atlas in their car anymore.

I realize my “worst case scenario “ is probably a bit far fetched but we see the same thing in lesser degrees already happening.
 
As a college instructor, I’ve had students use AI quite a bit ( not exactly using it in the best way) but usually easy to catch.

Always be weary of what you put into this AI systems. Many use input to train algorithms, so that’s why they are wrong often.
Be careful with sensitive information as that gets logged and used to train also .
There are a few platforms that do not use input for training.
 
I've been playing with it for the last few months so I don't get left behind. At first I was impressed, lately I'm surprised at how many errors are stated as fact. (Google AI, Grok, and ChatGPT).
 
Here's a good example from yesterday about AI being wrong with confidence!
 

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Most days I use it for cleaning up emails. Pretty easy to write what I need to say and then prompt it to "clean this up for a business email."

Great for coding too. Stackoverflow used to be the place to go if you needed some ideas, but now everyone just uses AI.

Part numbers used to be pretty frustrating, especially for something like dryers where most manufacturers use the same components but give them different numbers. AI will give you a list of all the part numbers that will work.
 
I use AI a bit at work but mainly use Claude models for specific things that I know generally where to find. I always confirm the output but if it can tell me where to go immediately it can save me 10 minutes to an hour of searching 1000s of pages and tables. I've used it for some stuff personally. I've played little games (i.e. I'm a gun shop owner, it's a customer), I've researched vehicle modifications, I've uploaded public land hunting guidelines to toe the line and help keep folks from crossing the line. It's useful, sometimes fun but I'm not glued to it.
 
I recently repaired a commercial range hood exhaust fan for my DIL’s restaurant. I took it apart and installed new bearings. The job itself wasn’t that bad but the location of the fan, greasiness, and weather made for some fairly profound suckage.

I want to use AI to generate a romance novel cover, but I don’t know how.

On the cover will be a picture of a handsome bearded man with no shirt on holding a huge crescent wrench. His yoked bronze musculature is lit up by a sunbeam. Behind him, a filthy rooftop fan housing radiates menace under a glowering winter sky. The title?

EXHAUST FAN !!
One man’s lonely struggle against neglected maintenance!

Other than that I don’t know what to do with it. Yet…..
 

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I’ve been using it more and more for administrative and project management task. Basically things for work that are non technical. Really helpful. It was helpful to summarize some of the detailed points of the IDFG non resident draw article they posted…helped to clarify some misleading formation I was hearing on a reputable podcast recently. More than anything, I’m just using it more and more to “test” it out and see if it’s helpful. For the most part, it’s been very good
 
I use it multiple times a day. I also have team meetings where we all work on building deliverables with AI to "upskill". There are lots of areas where AI is more bother than it is worth. Especially taking Excel to Powerpoint.

But for drafting and summarizing emails or getting through first drafts of papers and project documentation I think it is a pretty handy tool. It saved me hours of work in my mid-year reviews.
 
Another way you can use AI is to feed it terms of say a loan or a credit care and ask for a summary, highlights or any terms you should be aware of that aren't favorable for you.
 
The wife’s parents fall for poorly written scams as it is, they will surely fund the Christmas shopping of numerous scammers in the years to come. Just because something sounds well written, has believable photographs or videos, is no longer an accurate gauge of how believable it is.

Unfortunately the AI video clips that people are making are so good I find myself watching short format clips of normal interesting things believing them to be real when something small gives them away. I can’t remember the interview, probably something on Lex Fridman, but normal real videos are quickly being replaced by a flood of good quality AI generated clones to take advantage of the money available for content creators. I thought I was watching a wood worker chisel a wood joint, when the only thing giving it away was the type of wood wouldn’t chisel quite that easily. This is just the beginning. Every week more entire TV commercials are completely AI edited if not fully generated.

We have a recent college grad in the family that owes a large part of his degree and current job to AI. At first we saw it as a complete fraud, but kids put a lot of effort into using it in ways that are so good professors don’t catch it with their AI detection programs and it produces results better than that student could produce as a traditional student. This student’s dad was an early adopter and has used AI to progress farther in his career than his natural god given abilities would support. Both of them are more AI smart than book smart, or common sense smart, which must apply to far more people than just these two.

If someone believes students or employees should do things a certain way or not, AI is turning traditional norms on its head. If we didn’t see it in our family I would not have believed it’s already making such a big change. The guy you catch using AI in a stupid way isn’t nearly as impressive as the one that flies just under everyone’s radar. Lol
 
I use Claude pretty frequently. Im an IT support tech. Ive used it to make a couple of apps(i am NOT a programmer, I just have a basic, but competent understanding of programming and terminology) for taking photos of finished product and saving those photos in a specific folder, named a certain way so they are easily searchable, as well as a similar app to take photos of product loaded on the truck so we have a leg to stand on if a shipping company damages anything, all in python. Claude makes me look like a hero in that respect. I had a crude, but working program within 24 hours of it being mentioned in the meeting. Some powershell scripts, lots of other things like research to understand how systems or X software works, or "given X network situation, how would I go about troubleshooting", etc.

I also went down a rabbit hole once of what it would take to build a system with cameras that can identify flaws in a product: hardware requirements, how long it might take to train the system, costs, reasonable expectations of the size of flaws it could detect, etc.

I tried using it to build an app that can calculate BC based on velocity at 2 points and the distance between those 2 points (cheap winchester and Aguila ammo doesnt like to give BC) but after a few iterations it still wasnt giving me anything close to reasonable figures so I havent messed with it since.
 
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