Uh, kinda, maybe? Most use cases are things that I don’t really see the use of, or have found to produce more flawed results than previous ways of doing things.

However, a couple years ago, someone on reddit said their perfect use case was using AI to hunt down things you enjoyed but have forgotten the titles of - books, movies, tv series, songs, videogames, etc.

Well, I have a few of those half-forgotten items, where I’ve remembered snippets of things but have no idea what they actually were called. I’ve tried looking them up over the years with regular search engines, with no luck. And a few times in the past couple years, I’ve used random AI engines to try to track these titles down.

And the thing is, AI absolutely has not been able to tell me what the titles to anything was. However, in trying to come up with more details to pass to AI, I’ve accidentally found other webpages that helped me find what I was looking for. Like, one of the things I was looking for was a horribly bad 1970’s tv movie and, in my latest search for the title, on like page 8 of my google/duckduckgo results trying to find something to feed the AI from what little I remembered, I ran across a website that lists the cast and plot of, like, every tv movie. Not just top ten, or people that became big stars later, or horror movies or whatever, but every movie from like the 50s /60s on. And I sat on that website and read through the high-level plotline of every tv movie from, like 1968 on, and eventually found the movie.

There was a book where I remembered the first name of the main character and a very specific scene, even some of the exact words, and the three AI engines I tried couldn’t tell me anything. But in searching for more details (and I had tried serving for it before), I eventually ran across a book site that helped me out. Interesting thing: when I passed direct quotes to AI, they couldn’t tell me, when I asked what books had that plot, they couldn’t tell me, but if I asked if a specific scene happened in the book, they said it was there.

I have one game that I’m still searching for, but AI engines have inadvertently helped me find most of the rest of my wishlist.

I’ve enjoyed messing with Perplexity and Duck AI.

I used GPT to help me plan a 2 week long road trip with my family. It was pretty fucking awesome at finding cool places to stop and activities for my kids to do.

It definitely made some stupid ass suggestions that would have routed us far off our course, or suggested stopping at places 15 minutes into our trip, but sifting through the slop was still a lot quicker than doing all of the research myself.

I also use GPT to make birthday cards. Have it generate an image of some kind of inside joke etc. I used to do these by hand, and this makes it way quicker.

I also use it at work for sending out communications and stuff. It can take the information I have and format it and professionalize it really quick.

I also use it for Powershell scripting here and there, but it does some really wacky stuff sometimes that I have to go in and fix. Or it halucinates entire modules that don’t exist and when I point it out it’s like “good catch! That doesn’t exist!” and it always gives me a little chuckle. My rule with AI and Powershell is that I don’t ask it to do things that I don’t already know how to do. I like to learn things and be good at my job, but I don’t mind using GPT to help with some of the busy work.

https://goblin.tools

The only time I’ve seen real use from an ai tool is at work, we are using it to get data from an invoice/quote/etc from the pdf that we get emailed to data that we can put in the database. It’s not a perfect solution, but there isn’t really anything else we can find other than getting people to do it, which is slower and more expensive.

I use predictive AI for certain classification tasks daily at work, however I call that Deep Learning and not AI. I don’t want to be too specific, but you can imagine we are classifying certain objects - is this a traffic light, is this a tree etc. It is a task that cannot be solved geometrically very good, so Deep Learning is the perfect use case there.

I mostly use it to generate smut for gooning. It’s useful for that. Chat gpt is absolutely filthy if you get it going the right way.

https://notebooklm.google.com/ is really handy for various things, you can throw a bunch of documents into it and then ask questions and chat interactively about their contents. I’ve got a notebook for a roleplaying campaign I’m running where I’ve thrown the various sourcebook PDFs, as well as the “setting bible” for my homebrew campaign, and even transcripts of the actual sessions. I can ask it what happened in previous episodes that I might have forgotten, or to come up with stats for whatever monster I might need off the cuff, or questions about how the rules work.

Copilot has been a fantastic programming buddy. For those going a little more in depth who don’t want to spring for a full blown GitHub Copilot subscription and Visual Studio integration, there’s https://voideditor.com/ - I’ve hooked it up to the free Gemini APIs and it works great, though it runs out of tokens pretty quickly if you use it heavily.

GPT to write emails

Copilot in VScode is something you’d have to tear out of my cold, dead hands. Pressing Tab to auto complete is so useful. I use the GPT 4.1 model or whatever it is called. I tried Gemini but for some reason it’s complete ass when doing code. Android Studio Gemini is worse than the free tier on the website.

However, I’ve found the Gemini Pro model on the website is incredibly good for information assistance. To give an idea of my current uses, I have two chats pinned on it: fact checking and programming advice. I use the former for general research that would take more than a few minutes of Googling but need an answer now, and the latter for brainstorming code design or technical tutorials (recently had it help me set up a VM in WSL).

One tool I wish I could use is ElevenLabs. Had a friend on the free tier of it make some really cool and convincing voice lines (I forgot what character it was) a long time ago. Looks easy to use too. I can’t justify spending money just to play with it but if I had a purpose for it, I would.

Supermaven code autocomplete in vscode is really nice

LLMs can be useful in hyperfocused , contained environments where the models are trained on a specific data set to provide a service for a specific function only. So it won’t be able to answer random questions you throw at it, but it can be helpful on the only thing it’s trained to do.

I like it for coming up with quick, modular code that produces whatever direct result I want without having to reivent the wheel provided I more or less understand how it works and how to tweak it to refine what I want or how it does it

The one that the other department tried, and which failed to meet expectations dramatically. Gave management a healthy dose of reality on “AI”.