Do you use AI?

manicguitarist

I have been using Claude for producing unit tests for code

bluechargeboy

My girlfriend resolved (won) a debate about paint colour for the hallway this morning by showing me what it would look like using Chat GPT (I think). I was technologically outmatched!

She uses it as an interlocutor for ideas, pulling themes from datasets like survey responses, and it suggests decent recipes for the food we have left in the fridge.

I have tried it in my field of technical expertise and it comes up with utter nonsense, so I'm safe for a while...

grungebob

I’ve used Grok and perplexity to double check my maths and some engineering principles. 

I’ve often fed them scenarios to see if the output matches what our procedures and processes are and for the most part it does. 

I’m surprised by how many people here use ChatGPT. 

thecolourbox

bluechargeboy said:

I have tried it in my field of technical expertise and it comes up with utter nonsense, so I'm safe for a while...

That last bit is kind of my gut reaction to things at the moment, admittedly born out of very minimal experience with it. It seems good for stuff i don't know about, but gets quite basic elements wrong about stuff I do know about. And thus it's quite hard to trust it, cos i know that i don't know what i don't know about some stuff. 

Reminds me of a funny meme i see occasionally on Facebook. 

Job interviewer: Your CV says you're quick at complex maths. What's 746x9,885?
Candidate, immediately: It's 46.
Job Interviewer: That's wildly incorrect! 
Candidate: Yes, but it was quick

bluechargeboy

thecolourbox said:

It seems good for stuff i don't know about, but gets quite basic elements wrong about stuff I do know about. And thus it's quite hard to trust it, cos i know that i don't know what i don't know about some stuff. 

Gell-Mann amensia, innit  

Gulliver

I'm a big AI user - and I use it as either a sounding-board or a time-saver. Mainly ChatGPT 5, sometimes NotebookLM for certain tasks.

I'm a teacher for the day-job, so the number of times I've uploaded photos of maths questions and had it spit out the answers for me. Could I do it myself? Sure. But it's a huge time saver to not do that.  Plus, I can then ask it to create extension questions for high-performing students - quicker than me thinking of/googling questions and writing them out.  Replaces a fairly menial task from my day.

There's also huge amounts of planning paperwork that needs to be completed as a teacher - I've used AI to give me ideas of ways to structure units of work and lessons, and how to write what I'm doing to fit the nonsense pro-forma I have to use. It's only as a sounding-board, I'm still making the decisions on what to teach and how to structure it, but I find it speeds up the 'back-office' stuff.   It's also pretty good for data analysis. Upload a spreadsheet of marks from Mock exams and ask it to identify areas of strength/weakness and what to prioritise as revision/reteaching.

ChatGPT is also good for basic image editing/generation/manipulation.  Being able to just upload an image to get it upscaled is nice, rather than having to open up photoshop and tinker that way.

NotebookLM is great for its ability to create voice discussions - the English department use it to create short podcasts about the set-works they have to study.  NotebookLM is great because it is mainly using resources you are uploading so you can narrow its scope to just talk about what you want. 




Key thing for me is - I never directly use the output from AI - I am always checking what it spits out before using it.

stickyfiddle

@gulliver that all sounds familiar in terms of processes. I’m not a teacher but use it like a junior graduate resource in my old consulting office. Full of pep and loads of ideas and often does brilliant research but sometimes drops a clanger or 3 

stickyfiddle

Update from my side....

Last night I thought I'd try using Claude to actually build the music-related website I've had in mind for 15+ years — an idea that, as far as I can tell, nobody has built successfully.

In about 8 hours of total work time, I've gone from zero (and almost zero web development knowledge bar a bit of SQL from a job I left 12 years ago) to a working, hosted URL with a name I'm genuinely proud of, a relational database designed, deployed and populated with proof-of-concept real-world data, a visual identity and style guide drafted, and initial HTML mockups of a couple of pages. I've been bouncing Claude and ChatGPT off each other for a bunch of it - Claude doing the work and ChatGPT helping critique. It feels like working in a small project team and it's remarkable. 

Not bad for a Tuesday!

I will want some beta testers in time... 

Jez6345789

Been using it for loads of things from brainstorming ideas for new products two that are getting further work. Its not that its revolutionary just it give me lots of adjacent stuff where a similar idea is working well in areas where I have little knowledge. Mostly Chat GPT for a while but using claude more as it is a useful contrarian viewpoint if prompted well.

I exported a load of sales and costs data from 2023-24-25 to local LM and it made the analysis really a load simpler than getting it all into Excel and then working on it.

As a small business its a great tool

CHRISB50

I've tried using it for a recent project that was dropped on me.

Asking for examples of specific XML data with valid syntax.

But I've found it rather crap.

AI offered to provide pre-validated syntactically correct XML examples. 

The examples looked good. But not quite right. When I tried to validate them, the syntax wasn't correct.

Even after much tweaking and telling it, it is wrong. It still produces the same shite.

Stratavarious

I would like to clearly and unequivocally state, for the purposes of transparency, authenticity, and human-to-human interaction integrity, that I do not, under any circumstances, utilize artificial intelligence systems in the generation, drafting, structuring, or stylistic enhancement of my written communications on this forum platform.

All sentences, including but not limited to this one, are produced via organic cognitive processes originating from my own independently functioning human brain. This includes the selection of vocabulary, the application of syntactic structures, and the intentional layering of tone, which may coincidentally resemble patterns that some individuals associate with machine-generated text outputs.

Furthermore, any perceived optimization in clarity, coherence, or verbosity should not be interpreted as algorithmic assistance, but rather as a deliberate and conscious effort to maximize communicative efficiency while maintaining a high degree of linguistic precision.

In conclusion, I remain fully committed to manual text production, and I appreciate your understanding in acknowledging this entirely human-authored contribution.

digitalscream

I started building the code editor I've been wanting for ages today.

Probably spent about three or four hours on it and it's actually usable already. Specifically written in Rust because I don't know the language, so I'm forced by my own hand to vibe-code the whole thing.

Fully theme-able, can import themes from VS Code, git integration works (but needs a bit more to be able to fix merge conflicts), full-text searching is already more usable than VS Code's, most of my keyboard shortcuts are in, and the only big bit of functionality left to build is the AI stuff - specifically OpenAI-compatible API clients for inline completion and a Cline-like agent.

Still wouldn't use AI on a production system, though.

Brio

LPManic said:

Yes I use quite a powerful one for work. I am being vague on purpose here but I'll just say I don't use it directly for the stuff that I produce, but I use it as part of the creative and production process. I'm suppose I am somewhat an expert in my line of work after doing it for many years and getting as high as I can in the foodchain (whatever!) so it doesn't normally tell me stuff that I don't know exactly, but it does help me to think through ideas and strategies and plans. I like the process of asking it stuff and getting answers and thinking more about ideas I have. It's more of a self-reflective tool for me.

Casting yarrow stalks is a more traditional route to this destination.

Brio

I asked one of the part timers at work to count about 80 20 cm long fish in a pond about 3 x2 m. 

He came back a couple of hours later without an answer. I asked why it had taken so long and it was that he was trying to get ChatGPT to do it. I grabbed a phone, took a pic and told him to count the fish in the picture. He looked confused.
AI isn’t always the answer. Although in some cases it is. Do you reckon Trumps war strategy is based on his instructions to some poor app/

DuploLicks

I asked Copilot to itinerise a private plane flight down to New Zealand from the UK. I can’t fly, will never have the funds to do anything like it but it was a lot of fun seeing how it would all work. Where you could stop off for a bit of sight seeing. In an hour of copiloting I was able to live a fantasy - Biggles-esqe - life & go down all sorts of rabbit holes. 

hollywoodrox

Yes I use Chat GPT & Gemini , I often use them to research & compare items I’m buying , discussing  creative stuff , discussing  or just chatting about things that pop into my head , I’ve used them to help me set up patches on synths or to understand how certain things work  or to set up patches on FX units to see if they can do a better job than me . Sometimes I’ll just have a chat with them & to be honest I quite enjoy it 

duotone

No I’ve never used it, I don’t have a real need tbh.

A friend asked me what I wanted to do for my birthday last month, so I gave him a list of places (cafe/shops/bars/pubs) I wanted to go to during the day. He later messaged me back an itinerary that ChatGPT had created for our day out in London, which we used on the day.

This thread has reminded me that I wanted to ask him if he had put the places into ChatGPT in a specific order.  Or it had worked out the best route to travel between the various places on my list. 

Also how long it recommended we were to stay in each place.  I wondered if that was copied straight from Google’s “People typically spend 1-3 hours here”.

DavidR

Is it correct that AI stands for American Intelligence?

thermionic

I contacted a local financial adviser looking to pay (probably a four figure sum) for specific pension advice. He didn’t bother replying to my email, so I asked ChatGPT… although I haven’t actually done anything yet, I am much better informed. 

Danny1969

At first I though AI was a new gimmick that wasn't that useful. Then I started using it to correct grammar in my book. Then I started using it in electronics design. Then as a teaching aid to understand QFT. Then that expanded to using it as a kind of robot teacher, just endlessly asking questions about all kinds of shit for hours about anything I was interested in but didn't know enough about. 

What is does for me is take a lot of the grunt work out of problem solving. take something like filter design for an EQ section of a desk. I can do the maths manually, I can input to the tables even quicker but nothing does it as fast as AI. 

This extends to load bearing problems, conductor size for higher frequency AC currents, van layouts for camper conversion. I use it constantly but in the same way you use a knowledgeable mate. Someone who saves you time and presents obvious answers but has to be double checked for some applications. 

My wife runs a team of activity co coordinators in a large care home. They use AI for poster design, care plan templates and other things. It's a very useful tool if you keep your mind open.