Do you use AI?

stickyfiddle

Without wanting to get into the relative existential arguments around all of it, I'm interested:

Are you using anything AI, and if so which one(s) and what for? 

thumpingrug

Ive used Chat GTP and Google Gemini to help produce more polished documents and reports.  Nothing more than that.

TTBZ

I've used ChatGPT for what I consider pointless tasks at work like setting myself goals/writing my self review, and writing up presentations. Other than that I don't really bother. Actually I did use ChatGPT once to see how I'd look with a shaved head, since I'm starting to recede a bit. Looked ok

Sporky

Not any more, apart from very occasional Goblin Tools to check or adjust the tone of something.

octatonic

I've been using Codex to help me write the Mac audio applications that I am developing.

stickyfiddle

Personally I've used ChatGPT for tracking health and food, asking a load of research questions to speed up thinking on guitar & fx stuff, and finding gluten free restaurants & recipes, as well helping get to grips with Riyadh and where I can buy stuff over there when I need to. Also for band planning - simply ordering and excel-outputting of song lists and also concepts for band outfits and visual design. It's crap at maths and got some logic completely wrong on a guitar setup question (possibly because it's fed by forums and reddit/facebook and god knows the advice on those is dreadful). Recently it's started becoming rather sycophantic and far less useful overall so I've been branching out.* 

I've used Gemini for some of the above and also rendering apartment layouts to help visualise an empty room with furniture. But it's also annoying me after a couple of weeks. It's much better and faster for image gen than ChatGPT. 

I've used Copilot for organising notes and meeting minutes at work. It's useless at producing anything like a finished document but for turning a transcript into a set of minutes and actions in 5 minutes instead of 30 it's fantastic. 

I've just signed up to Claude to give that a go. It's good so far when I've been talking about dinner and lunch plans. 

(*Also the company president gave a massive donation to Trump recently so fuck that)

Sporky

stickyfiddle said:

Recently it's started becoming rather sycophantic and far less useful overall so I've been branching out.* 

You can fix that. Settings/personalisation/custom instructions, and put in something like "Clear factual answers only. No sycophancy. No second guessing what I want to hear. Check your answers before replying. State your level of confidence."

It'll still make shit up but not as much.

Teetonetal

Yes, I use the Microsoft copilot on a Monday morning to summarise the open emails from the previous week and also to generate me an open task list.

drofluf

Every so often our marketing department comes up with a “clever idea™” on lines tell us why you like working in a team. 

I usually lob it over to ChatGPT spend 5 minutes polishing the language and reap the kudos for a job well done. 

digitalscream

I use my own local AI - as such, you probably won't recognise the models. I'm using GLM 4.7 Flash (without thinking) for planning and logical problems, and Qwen 3 Coder 30B for agentic code work. Until recently, I used Copilot (with GPT 4.1) for code completion, but I've managed to get Qwen 3 working for completion so that's gone now too - it's actually about as good as GPT 4.1 for completions, which is astonishing.

Basically, there are some things I work on - not for work - that I absolutely don't want cloud services training their models on.

Then there's also the forum pre-moderation stuff I'm working on to try to skip over some of the Online Safety Act stuff.

My wife uses gpt-oss:20b for her work - she can't use commercial cloud models, because a lot of her work concerns vulnerable people. She actually finds it much easier to control than when she's used GPT, and its habit of presenting most stuff in tables really helps her dyslexic brain.

I've experimented a lot with all the open-weight models, and I still haven't found any of the bigger models that work well (even though I've got 64GB VRAM to play with). I'm hoping that the Qwen folk come out with a smaller coder version of the Qwen 3.5 monster they released last week.

It ain't cheap doing this, though - I have a pair of AMD R9700 GPUs, at a cost of about £1200 each. It can be done cheaper - you could get a pair of 24GB 3090s at ~450 each, for example, but the problem there is cooling. I couldn't solve it without rebuilding the whole system from the ground up...and the allure of the 32GB GPUs was just too great.

EDIT: Worth noting that you can run stuff like Qwen3 Coder and GLM 4.7 Flash on a single 3090 with slightly less context, and gpt-oss:20b runs happily on a 16GB GPU of almost any kind (just don't bother with Intel GPUs, they're absolute junk for running AI stuff because of Intel's terrible software support).

TimmyO

I stick to using NotebookLM and upload material I want to learn (eg material from a course I’m doing on neurodivergence) and then interrogate it - I find it really helps me pull out concepts and them u sweat and them more easily than just reading the dry material.

when I then do read the original stuff long form it goes in better. 

The reason I do that in NotebookLM is that is almost completely removes my fear of spending as much time confirming stuff isnt made up or pulled from a
less reliable source 

DefaultM

Sporky said:

stickyfiddle said:

Recently it's started becoming rather sycophantic and far less useful overall so I've been branching out.* 

You can fix that. Settings/personalisation/custom instructions, and put in something like "Clear factual answers only. No sycophancy. No second guessing what I want to hear. Check your answers before replying. State your level of confidence."

It'll still make shit up but not as much.

I've used it for info on how long a personal injury case usually takes after a car crash and how to speed things up.
It started telling me that it wants me to know that I’m not less of a person or broken after this happening. I never suggested I felt any particular way about what has happened and so I found those comments very weird. I wanted some information not a counselling session.

ElectricXII

I've used ChatGPT quite a bit for holiday and travel itineraries, and with diagnosing technical stuff in areas in which I'm unfamiliar. I occasionally, against my better judgement, read what Google AI feeds me when I search for something.

AI is a useful timesaver sometimes, but it's often so inaccurate that I don't trust it and need to recheck stuff.

stickyfiddle

Sporky said:

stickyfiddle said:

Recently it's started becoming rather sycophantic and far less useful overall so I've been branching out.* 

You can fix that. Settings/personalisation/custom instructions, and put in something like "Clear factual answers only. No sycophancy. No second guessing what I want to hear. Check your answers before replying. State your level of confidence."

It'll still make shit up but not as much.

Yeah I did that ages ago. It still blows smoke after a while. 

Nebulous

Not for me.
Bad enough reading the average eBay descriptions these days.
My music computer isn’t connected to the internet. 

That’s where I shine.

AntonHunter

Not knowingly, do my best to turn it off wherever it's forced on me, like adding "-ai" to web searches etc.

I don't do anything particularly heavy data-wise for dayjob, otherwise I could see the appeal of running something offline, for example. 

Axe_meister

Very much use it. Gemini enterprise is great when combined with workspace.
Come quietly performance review "Based on the last 3 months emails and chats what have been my top 10 achievers. Summarise in 340 words.
Combined with Google sheets, I wanted to add additional line items to about 5000 SKUs. Quick description of what I wanted to do. And two mins alter it was done.
Real time translation in Google meet.

Sporky

stickyfiddle said:

Yeah I did that ages ago. It still blows smoke after a while. 

Ah. I gave up shortly after adding that to my settings. 

Philly_Q

I use Copilot, essentially as a search engine, especially in work. 

Trying to research a technical point in Google was always a pain in the arse, it would ignore a specific word in the question and give almost the opposite of what I was looking for, or it would give answers relevant to US or Australian law despite me saying UK in the search.

AI actually answers the question, and you can always refine the question and check the sources.

distressed

Generative Fill in Photoshop is a life (and time) saver. Other than that, Gemini, Nano Banana and few others for various tasks.

Jetsam1

Did some silly pictures with Bing AI a while ago. I am still to actually use it at work even though we have full approval for Co Pilot.