I'm not a fan of generative AI in general, and LLM technology specifically. I think its capabilities are being drastically over-hyped. It's a perfect, sweaty example of a solution looking for a problem. I'm skeptical of many claims people are making wrt how it's helping them.

My experience is it's like having access to an idiot-savant intern. Awful at most tasks, but knows everything and can read incredibly quickly.

Publicly, I've taken on the mantle of a staunch critic of generative AI and a pro-human, pro-soul advocate.

And for the most part, I'm happy with that stance. I like it. It feels good to rail against something, and it feels good to contrast a thing that I hate against something I love. It throws the love into more relief.

Yet, I don't want to lose any babies in that bathwater, and I don't want to lose my intellectual honesty in the neurochemical rush of fighting for a cause. So I'd love to explore the best use cases of LLMs that you all are actually using, and actually finding beneficial, life improving, productivity increasing, all of that.

I'd love to hear your experience, and ideally, you'd to tell me how you're doing what you're doing with it in enough detail so that I can try it.

I'll start.

Absolutely most useful thing I've found for it so far, and it's not even close, is language learning.

I'm in a slow process of learning Japanese, and asking a chatbot to break down the grammar of a specific sentence is super useful. It's also great for generating content for flashcards. Say you have a set of characters, and you want some example words that use each particular character. It's so easy to generate stuff like that.

Outside of that, I use it in super basic ways (basically as google with one less step).

So please, give me your best use cases, things that you've not only been impressed by, in a "oh wow, that monkey can tap dance!" way, but that has actually improved the quality of your life.

generative ai

Please help me stay intellectually honest!