When I search this topic online, I always find either wrong information or advertising lies. So what is actually something that LLMs can do very well, as in being actually useful and not just outputing a nonsensical word salad that sounds coherent.
Results
So basically from what I’ve read, most people use it for natural language processing problems.
Example: turn this infodump into a bullet point list, or turn this bullet point list into a coherent text, help me with rephrasing this text, word association, etc.
Other people use it for simple questions that it can answer with a database of verified sources.
Also, a few people use it as struggle duck, basically helping alleviate writers block.
Thanks guys.
Brainstorming. ChatGPT and co. are slightly better rubber ducks. Which helps to sort my thoughts and evaluate ideas.
Also when researching a new topic I barely know anything about, it helps to get useful pointers and keywords for further research and reading. It’s like an interactive Wikipedia in that regard.
I am not using it for this purpose, but churning out large amounts of text that doesn’t need to be accurate is proving to be a good fit for:
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scammers, who can now write more personalize emails and also have conversations
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personality tests
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horoscopes or predictions (there are several examples even on serious outlets of “AI predicts how the world will end” or similar)
Due to how good LLMs are at predicting an expected pattern of response, they are a spectacularly bad idea (but are obviously used anyway) for:
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substitute for therapy
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virtual friends/girlfriend/boyfriend
The reason they are such a bad idea for these use cases is that fragile people with self-destructive patterns do NOT need those patterns to be predicted and validated by a LMM.
Have they given you anything creative that was good. I also, used it to make a meal plan and make a work schedule as an Excel doc, then it just needed a few edits.
Would you say you are good at creating a meal plan or a work schedule by yourself, with no AI? I suspect if you know what a good meal plan looks to you and you are able to visualize the end result you want, then genAI can speed up the process for you.
I am not good at creative tasks. My attempts to use genAI to create an image for a PowerPoint were not great. I am wondering if the two things are related and I’m not getting good results because I don’t have a clear mental picture of what the end result should be so my descriptions of it are bad
In my case, I wanted an office worker who was juggling a specific set of objects that were related to my deck. After a couple of attempts at refining my prompt, Dall-E produced a good result, except that it had decided that the office worker had to have a clown face, with the make-up and the red nose.
From there it went downhill. I tried “yes, like this, but remove the clown makeup” or “please lose the clown face” or “for the love of Cthulhu, I beg you, no more clowns” but nothing worked.
I once asked ChatGPT how it (AI) works. It gave me the tools needed to get the right results. There were books on prompt engineering free online. But I decided after reading them that it was easier to have AI teach me to use AI…better. that’s the LLMs. On the other hand for image generation, it takes persistence and priority. If the prompt is too complicated, it will do its own thing. If it is too simple, it will do its own thing. After a lot of practice getting to know how it outputs images you will find the right, or close results. Emphasis on close. Leonardo.ai is my favorite.
Edit: if you don’t believe you are creative enough, prone the LLM for ideas. Ask it to make the prompt. They are finnicky
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Not exactly sure this is the “right way” to use them, but I use one as an autocomplete helper in my IDE. I don’t ask it to code anything, just use it as autocomplete.
Majority of the time, it works well, especially in common languages like Python.
As a developer, I use LLMs as sort of a search engine, I ask things like how to use a certain function, or how to fix a build error. I try to avoid asking for code because often the generated code doesn’t work or uses made up or deprecated functions.
As a teacher, I use it to generate data for exercises, they’re especially useful for populating databases and generating text files in a certain format that need to be parsed. I tried asking for ideas for new exercises but they always suck.
kill time
Just rewrote my corporate IT policies. I feed it all the old policies and a huge essay of criteria, styles, business goals etc. then created a bunch of new policies. I have chatgpt interview me about the new policies, I don’t trust what it outputs until I review it in detail and I ask it things like
What do other similar themed policies have that I don’t? How is the policy going to be hard to enforce? What are my obligations annually, quarterly and so on?
What forms should I have in place to capture information ( i.e. consultant onboarding).
I can do it all myself but it would be slower and more likely to have consistency and grammatical errors.
I ask it increasingly absurd riddles and laugh when it hallucinates and tells me something even more absurd.
Philosophy.
Ask it to act as Socrates, pick a topic and it will help you with introspection.
This is good for examining your biases.
e.g. I want to examine the role of government employees.
e.g. when is it ok to give up on an idea?A fringe case I’ve found ChatGPT very useful is to learn more about information that is plentiful but buried in dead threads in various old school web forums and thus very hard to Google. Like other people’s experiences from homebrewing. Then I ask it for sources and most often it is accurate to the claims of other homebrewers that also can be correct or less correct.
I use it to review my meeting notes.
- “Based on the following daily notes, what should I follow-up on in my next meeting with #SomeTeamTag?”
- “Based on the following daily notes, what has the #SomeTeamTag accomplished the past month?”
- etc.
I’m not counting on it to not miss anything, but it jogs my memory, it does often pull out things I completely forgot about, and it lets me get away with being super lazy. Whoops, 5 minutes before a meeting I forgot about? Suddenly I can follow up on things that were talked about last meeting. Or, for sprint retrospectives, give feedback that is accurate.
To add: I’ve also started using AI to “talk to podcast guests.” You can use Whisper to transcribe a podcast, then give the transcript to AI to ask questions. I find the Modern Wisdom Podcast is great for this.
While this is something LLMs are decent at, I feel this is only of value if your notes are unstructured, and it presents infosec concerns.
I guess my notes are unstructured, as in they’re what I type as I’m in the meeting. I’m a “more is better” sort of note taker, so it’s definitely faster to let AI pull things out.
Infosec … I guess people will have to evaluate that for themselves. Certainly, for my use case there’s no concern.
I record meetings of my building’s board of management, nothing secret there, very mundane. I run it through Whisper and give the transcript to ChatGPT. It condenses everything into accurate minutes, resolutions and action items. Saves me a shit ton of work, finished in seconds. I’m never going back!
I use it to help me come up with better wording for things. A few examples:
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Writing annual goals for my team. I had an outline of what I wanted my goals to be, but wanted to get well written detail about what it looks like to meet or exceed expectations on each goal and to create some variations based on a couple of different job types.
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Brainstorming interview questions. I can use the job description and other information to come up with a starting list of questions and then challenge the LLM to describe how the question is useful. I rarely use the results as-is, but it helps me to think through my interview plan better than just using a list of generic questions.
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Converting a stream of thought bullet list into a well written communication.
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It has helped with some simple javascript bookmarklets
Translation and summarisation of text. Though, I do double check.Also, getting an initial draft for some mails or rephrasing mails that I want to make more formal+concise.
I use it pretty sparsely, and it’s stuff that’s simple but if I were to google I’d get a whole 10 page essay about filled with ads.
For example here’s some of my recent searches, the span is like ~2 months back.
- XXL and 2X being the same thing.
- Rainbow Minecraft MOTD server text.
- Script to find all the schematic files in my ~30 nested files and copy them to a new folder
- how to get cat hair out of clothes
- some legal supreme court thing from the 1800s
- creative commons CC-BY-SA explanation (their website didn’t explain what the abbreviation of “BY” was)
- how to unlock my grandad’s truck with the code
- “can ghosts be black” (??? I think I was in a silly argument on discord)
- how to read blood pressure
- scene from movie where I forgot the movie
- how to draw among us in desmos calculator as a joke
When I’m in a hurry I use them for
- longer more complex excel formulas.
- to create powercell scrips to manipulate large csv-files.
I used it to teach me app script and it was 90 percent accurate
Database queries, especially OpenSearch/ElasticSearch
