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1. mort96+(OP)[view] [source] 2025-05-22 08:35:10
> I think most people in here know at least a few ways they can use AI that is genuinely useful to them

The only thing that really comes to mind is making something in a domain where I have almost no prior expertise.

But then ChatGPT is so frequently wrong, and so frequently repeatedly wrong when it tries to "correct" problems when pointed out, that even then I always have to go and read relevant documentation and re-write the thing regardless. Maybe there's some slight usefulness here in giving me a starting point, but it's marginal.

replies(1): >>blixt+d1
2. blixt+d1[view] [source] 2025-05-22 08:45:07
>>mort96+(OP)
My list of uses of AI includes:

- Turning a lot of data into a small amount of data, such as extracting facts from a text, translating and querying a PDF, cleaning up a data dump such as getting a clean Markdown table from a copy/pasted HTML source of a web page etc (IMO it often goes wrong when you go the other way and try to turn a small prompt into a lot of data)

- Creating illustrations representing ephemeral data (eg my daily weather report illustration which I enjoy looking at every day even if the data it produces is not super useful: https://github.com/blixt/sol-mate-eink)

- Using Cursor to perform coding tasks that are tedious but I know what the end result should look like (so I can spend low effort verifying it) -- it has an 80% success rate and I deem it to save time but it's not perfect

- Exploration of a topic I'm not familiar with (I've used o3 extensively while double checking facts, learning about laws, answering random questions that would be too difficult to Google, etc etc) -- o3 is good at giving sources so I can double check important things

Beyond this, AI is also a form of entertainment for me, like using realtime voice chat, or video/image generation to explore random ideas and seeing what comes out. Or turning my ugly sketches into nicer drawings, and so forth.

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