MSE Forum Poll: Have you used AI?

MSE_JC

While it may have sounded like science fiction up until a few years ago, we're now firmly in the age of AI. From generating images and videos to writing poems and composing music, there seems to be no end of potential uses - whether that's good or bad is a whole other question.

Have you used artificial intelligence? Vote in the poll below then - if you have used it - tell us in the thread what you used it for.

YellowSupporter

I use chatGPT and Claude everyday at work, as a software engineer, not always correct but save a lot of googling & completely replaced Stack overflow.
Just planned a trip to Malta using Gemini which worked great - haven't gone yet though

MyRealNameToo

Given Google will give you an AI response to certain questions when you are searching these days I'm not sure that anyone can truly say they havent used it... may not have liked it, may have gone on to then use the traditional search results instead but there we go. 

I have used it occasionally, it's given a reasonable starting place but most of it is very obviously generated by AI and either very vague or often factually questionable. Just look at the US Lawyer who got fined by a judge for citing case law that didnt exist but AI had generated in some text when he had asked AI to produce a statement for him. 

mark_cycling00

"used AI"?

Used a customer service chat bot?
Watched an advert on Netflix that was curated by AI? Some ads have over a million variants 
Looked at AI recommended products on a website?
Read an AI summary of product reviews on Amazon?
Used online banking that uses AI to spot fraudulent logins and transactions?
Been kept safe at an airport where AI monitors CCTV streams to spot suspicious behaviour?
Used auto complete or suggestions in email or Word?

Or do we just been asked chatgpt a question or generated some Italian brain rot?

twopenny

I;ve advised people on forums with outlandished travel suggestions from AI.

Seen some crazy ideas about house renovations and such.

I paint draw sew can make a lot of things, plan a holiday, enjoy taking photos and learning how to get the best shot.

I like the aspect of learning how to do stuff well.

And feel that AI is half baked still.

I've seen so fun things people do with it in creating photos but I don't have the time to fiddle with that.

Vitor

Use every day, paid account on ChatGPT; I'm skilled at prompt engineering 

itsthelittlethings

I have used Copilot a couple of times, I’m not a major user. I tend to use the auto replies in emails as timesavers. That’s it really.

TimeLord1

What doesn't have artificial intelligence online nowadays? Buying, selling, spending, calling—you will find an AI bot.

liltdiddylilt

I’m assuming this relates to actually hunting down a specific AI such as ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, CoPilot et al? 

You can’t get away from AI these days. Even those people who state firmly they don’t trust it & won’t be using it, talk to it every time they try & access customer services with their bank, Amazon, Uber Eats, etc. The initial communication is with a bot, which “talks” to you to get specific information about your reason for contacting the call centre. They cover the time consuming parts with AI, so you complete your ID checks, go through security & sort your query to the correct team, before you’ve even spoken to a human. I actually like that part of the process, being an anxious type. I’d rather not speak to a human at all, which is why I tend to opt to communicate via “Live Chat” than actually call a helpline. 

I’ve used ChatGPT to do a few things recently, & the same with Gemini. My bank’s “virtual assistant” is called Cora, & I find that it cuts a lot of time out by pre-empting a number of the things I would have to type out to a human. 

ChatGPT really shone when my teenager used it to help with her maths homework & some English test revision. She could have asked it for the answer to the algebra question she had been given on her Google Classroom account from school as homework. But, she instead screenshot the question, & typed “explain how I work out the answer to this”. Up popped a neat little instant explanation of how to work through the sum, without giving the answer. She immediately recognised the step she was missing, & went off, working out the answer & being given a correct mark for both that, & the next question, which was the same type of sum. If I were to balance it alongside her sitting a year ago & asking the Alexa in our living room the answer to a maths question, I absolutely prefer the AI. It gave her the tools to work the question out for herself, therefore still helping her to learn, where the Alexa just gave her the answer immediately & she wrote it down. 

The English was a stroke of genius on her part, frankly. She was revising a piece of writing by Maya Angelou (Still I Rise), where she needed to do an essay question response in class the next day. She wrote to ChatGPT, “create a revision guide for >insert exact question< about the poem Still I Rise, by Maya Angelou”. Immediately, reams of information came up on screen. It essentially took out the bulk of the research that she would have to do, & cut down her reading massively. She used that guide to study, & came out with perfect marks when she wrote her essay the following day. Again, she wasn’t being fed the answer to write exactly. The revision guide balanced both sides of the question she was being asked, & explained succinctly what she could have found by sitting & googling & making notes. It meant that instead of trying to absorb the bulk of the information in a cram session the night before, what she instead did was to come to me with a written essay response, & ask what I thought. I said she had just looped around, without going into enough detail, & one sentence she wrote didn’t make sense at all. You can imagine how my 13 year old responded to that. However, she went away, & came back about 45 minutes later, having written two pages instead of the ½ a page she did initially. It was thoughtful, well worded, & answered both sides of the question. It bore no resemblance to the study guide, in terms of - she had not just copied down what the guide said - & I was genuinely impressed & told her so. She went off & wrote it out twice more to cement it into her brain, as she’s a very visual learner. She was able to write it out very well under exam conditions the following day. I think it is no coincidence that when the “sets” were shuffled after Christmas, she was put several sets higher than she had previously been assessed. I can’t fault the way she uses AI, or what it produces to help her to learn. 

Overall, Pandora’s box has been opened. At almost 40, I am at a crossroads in life, where I can opt to be a dinosaur & stop learning how to use the newest technology as it advances, or I can roll with it & continue to learn. I’ve friends my age who just dismissively say they don’t understand it & are too old, & I see how that hampers the way they navigate the world. I am wary of what AI will be able to do in the coming years. I do foresee some kind of i-Robot disaster movie where it takes over & we become subjects of a nation of AI bots, & I think it is rendering large parts of the workforce obsolete. However, that happened with the industrial revolution & people who got on board & moved from manning a horse & plough, to driving a tractor kept the same role, but with less manual labour on their part. I feel AI will be similar. Watching how my teen is using it really opened up the capabilities I had never thought of, & I have used it for everything from giving me a “spell” to wish karma would smack into someone abruptly, to providing recipes for dinner based off a picture of the inside of my refrigerator!!

I just thought of another way AI is integrated into my life & has made a sizeable difference, for me, but mostly for my deaf younger sister. She has 20% hearing in one ear only, so she cannot take/make telephone calls. We are 200 miles apart so video calls help us to stay in touch properly. I am well-versed in ensuring that I remain facing the camera head on, don’t cover my mouth in any way & enunciate, as what she cannot hear, she lip reads. However; since Apple integrated AI into our new phones, I can stick my airpods in & go off folding laundry in another room, just as I would with my mum. She essentially has automatic subtitles, so she can read on screen what I’m saying. It’s a good enough degree of accuracy that she can work out the odd incorrect word. She’s also finally able to use that same system to type out in real time what doctors are saying at the hospital, so she no longer needs to have an advocate with her to translate. It would have been incredibly useful during Covid when masks meant she was almost entirely cut off from communicating with people. It’s the little things, that are really huge, life-changing things, that AI is bringing forward at a rate of knots!

TimeLord1

I think we all will eventually become just an online commodity and eventually, with time, technophobes. Just like traditional reading and writing, speaking is dying out in modern-day society.