Technology

I've found it helpful at work for things like preparing agendas for meetings, or creating an outline of a presentation or document I need to write.

I've also found it helpful when I'm trying to Google something where I need to be pretty specific and then I can't find exactly what I mean by searching.

I use it to see the answers to problems on my physics homework when I can't figure it or myself. It works far better than forums, which are mostly all paywalled these days.

So far, there have been two interesting uses I've seen for chat gpt.

One is I've used it to help me write regular expressions in the very rare time I need to for my job.

The other is kind of cool but also kind of troubling in a way. But I've come across a couple of therapy style chat bots that are essentially just reading off a list of "here's what to do for XYZ"

I've tested them a bit, and I've found I'm 1) concerned who gets access to the information shared. 2) If/when these kinds of bots will be used to manipulate people in a negative way. 3)The possibility of a bot replying in a bad way that could make an issue worse for someone

Overall, I like the idea of them. I find it's hard to process information if it's coming directly from myself, or accept compassion from myself. So funny enough, these chat bots actually work really well in that respect.

In some cases, I've had better discussions than I have had with actual therapists, which is funny but also sad.

So while there's some troubling possibilities, I think there's a lot of positives that I've seen from my time with it.

I've been making a small album of music out of lyrics I wrote and a consistent general style/genre using suno. It's pretty fun.

As a musician with experience recording albums, even when the songs come out basic, I can always re-record them myself and make them less generic.

Dank memes

For occasional chatting with Bing and translation help with DeepL.

I'm a bit disappointed to the practical uses, but I still get some value out of AI. I sometimes use chatgpt to tweak existing SQL scripts at work, and as a trouble shooting assistant. Also I use this tool ultimate vocal remover to extract stems from songs, mainly to make myself instrumentals to practice singing over. Those are really only things I do regularly, despite trying different self hosted AI tools. Most are cool but not very useful.

I've been using ChatGPT in conjunction with search engines just to find things I need. For instance, I did an April Fools presentation for a work meeting and needed humorous real-life legal stories, so the AI was able to provide suggestions.

I also use it to for simple tasks, like organizing info into a table.

Mainly, though, my reason for using it is that, since I work in tech, I'm going to need to know how to use it well, and the best way to do that is being hands-on.

• General purpose LLMs are starting to replace everyday queries I used to posit to Google. Perplexity can be quite good for this.
• Copilot as enhanced autocomplete when writing code. A particularly good use-case is writing tests: with a few test cases already written, a sufficiently good test name will most often generate a well-written test case.
• LLMs for lazy generation of SQL queries can sometimes be quite nice.
• Writing assistance for things I find myself struggling to get written by myself. A writing unblocking tool, if you will.

It's reducing the effort and time I have to put into some things, and I appreciate that. It's far from perfect, but it doesn't have to be perfect to be useful.

I'm using Claude (subbed) to help me do qualitative coding and summarizing within a very niche academic framework. I was encouraged to try it by an LLM researcher and frankly I'm happy with the results. I am using it as a tool to assist my work, not replace it, and I'm trying to balance the bias and insights of the tool with my own position as a researcher.

On that note, if anyone has any insights or suggestions to improve prompts, tools, or check myself while I tinker, please, tell me.

I tried using ChatGPT for making cover letters a while ago but the results were terrible, I do better just writing them myself.