Have you used so-called "AI" for actually productive work ?

I use it as a glorified Google search since Google search is absolute dogshit these days. But that's about it. ChatGPT is one of the most over hyped bullshit I've ever seen in my life.

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

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.

Claude sonnet 3.5 and GPT 4o are good for coding

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.

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 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'.

It taught me the way of unix.

I used to be afraid of the terminal in linux. Now i am eager to try openbsd.

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 think ChatGPT and other Ai can be a fantastic tool if you use it responsibly. It’s a great help for learning and practicing things. I’ve very recently made my first server and it’s great at answering all my simple questions that I sometimes feel hesitant to bother people with, and little things like that. Sometimes I’ll ask it to give me a simple kind of structure or bullet point list of topics I need to make sure to hit in my writing, or weirdly enough it’s pretty good at helping me with substitutions in recipes, or other little things like that. And I personally think that all of this is fine.

But I’m entirely against using it to create any kind of final product. Having it do any kind of actual final work is just stupid and lazy. I truly don’t think Ai is capable of making anything that’s worth peoples time really, and in the amount of time you’ll spend meticulously explaining everything that you want or need for whatever it is you have it generating for you, you could’ve just made it yourself and done a far better job. That’s where I draw the line. I don’t think Ai has to be inherently evil or anything because it can be a great tool, but you can’t rely on it to actually do things for you. Maybe others will disagree me I know many people especially in Fediverse circles are very very strongly anti Ai in all facets but that’s just my thoughts.

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.

58 comments? Meh I will put this in LLM and have it summarise it in bullet points.

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.

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.

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.

ChatGPT is very useful for coding.

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.

• When I'm stuck in debugging and can't think of what can go wrong, LLM chats are quite useful. I can ask for possibilities and often I find something meaningful that didn't come to mind. These kind of things are hard to do with search engines. (If I'm debugging something unfamiliar this becomes very counterproductive though, as I can't filter hallucinations by looking).
• A smart text formatter
• Simple bash one liner, boilerplate code generation. I tried it but non trivial/bit longer code generation again gets effectively slower as I find myself fixing/working around AI mistake quite often.

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’m a radiologist and our group uses an LLM tool to assist with generating reports on imaging studies. Our reports have a body that includes all of the imaging findings (which we dictate) and then a conclusion/summary calling out what is most important (and serving as a tl;dr for other physicians). The LLM tool analyzes the body to generate that summary of important findings. It certainly is not perfect and frequently requires some editing. Overall it is faster than me creating the summary each time though.

I've used llama3 to help me rewrite my ancient CV and gotten good results so far. I took what it suggested and changed things myself to make a bit more sense. I also use it to summarize things occasionally but that's about it.

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 have used it as a nicer version of web search, mostly for "How do I write code using this library I'm not yet familiar with?" It provides passable tutorials when the library's documentation is sparse (I get it) or poorly written (they tried 🤷‍♂️).

Absolutely. I've used it to write basic scripts that I didn't feel like spending time on. I've also used it to write cover letters. I always make sure to peruse through it to see what it did and make sure it works or sounds right.

I basically use it on rare rare occasion to help get me "unstuck" with creative tasks, I don't really use what it produces in the end, I wind up dismantling it entirely and rewriting it "properly" but it has a use you know?

Really worth listening to this podcast as well. It's a guy teaching corporate teams to make best use of AI. He goes over how to use it to get really great use by using it as a discussion rather than just asking it a question and expecting and accurate answer in the first instance

https://youarenotsosmart.com/2024/02/19/yanss-281-how-a-pernicious-cognitive-bias-limits-our-ability-to-use-chatbots-properly-and-to-overcome-it/

AI has been most useful for tech support for me. I wouldn't have been able to switch to Linux completely if AI didn't instantly find solutions for me, rather than being told by the community to read tomes of documentation.

I also use it a lot to find how to get office apps to do what I want.

I'm famous at work for being a poet, when I actually just ask AI to write a short witty poem.

You can use image generators to make nice personalised cards to share on special events.

AI can make mind maps and things like that if you tell it what you want.

I've used it once to suggest a specific term that I'm going to use in my comic. I was utterly incapable of formulating a conventional search query for a search engine so, after endlessly browsing various thesauri, in the end I resorted to asking perplexity ai. Still took a bit and I had to fight it to get it to understand what I was asking but I did eventually find a term that fits. Felt dirty afterwards. Does that count as "productive"?

The only other thing was the title of a book I read 30 years ago and had only vague memory of. So I gave it an approximate description including a plot point I thought I remembered. The first result it gave me wasn't it. But it claimed the plot involved the thing I remembered. I then asked again and the second result actually was the correct book - turns out I had almost completely misremembered the plot point but it still said "yep, this happens in this book". Very weird experience.

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

When I had a mold problem it was affecting my mind. I couldn’t think straight or focus, so I had ChatGPT make me a step by step plan for dealing with it, and it had it break each step down into nested sub-steps until no step was more than five minutes of effort, then I had it format the plan to copy-paste into workflowy.

It was really helpful. I could have made that plan myself, except that I was fucked up.

I use it in two ways.

ChatGPT as an interactive search. Last one was about EU GDPR compliance checklist to give a quick answer on what areas need to be looked at. I use it like once a week for work.

Productive in othen ways I use it once a month for recipes. Recipes are probably my favourite since I can say "Write it using grams and ml" and "give me some options to replace eggs and it writes out a legit recipe based on these millions of annoying blogs recipes.

Jetbrains AI auto complete for programming which is getting better slowly and I'm getting the hang of using it. It's really good for cases where I have a common thing that I don't remember the syntax of and I just type a name of a variable like "cspHeaderValue" and it will format thing that's very annoying to look up based on what I some values I wrote above.

I'm not a 10x engineer now for it, it's more like +10% overall and really depends on the task. I can see it go up to around +50% but an AI plateau might come before then.

I work in maintenance. I’ve looked some stuff up.

Its great for reading docs, I don't have to search through to find out how to get a user's playlists using the Spotify api

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

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.

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

My physics professor has us compare our answers to physics problems with a LLM's output. Somehow, the AI is even worse at physics then I am, it once simplified (4pi2) to 4.

I mainly use it to get a general direction/names/sources when I want to learn about someting but don't know where to start. So far it's the only use case for which I've found it reliably useful.

Copilot makes for a great autocomplete while programming. Saves me a ton of typing.

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.