How are you using AI in your personal or professional life?

Jim:

I have to agree with your experience. Talking with Ai is like talking to a person who is expert about just about everything.

I have been thinking about rational thinking (reason) and it is hard to define, but here is what I came up with - it's an empirical definition. Rational thinking is verified when the predictions it makes are correct. Add that to the idea (I forget who said it first) that the brain is a prediction machine and, that then is an excellent way to understand to discuss rational thinking. As an example we can think about astronomy. We can't do experiments with the planets or the stars, but if we can predict their orbits and predict an eclipse for example, then we can check the predictions based on rational thinking.

Preparing income taxes, I got answers from Ai at times of the day when even if I had a tax specialist that I had hired would not be available, and possibly would not immediately know the answer.

For just about any issue, whether about difficult computer problems, beyond my own professional experience, or troubleshooting some Ai Image Generation Apps, getting immediate help from Ai has been extremely useful and either free or very low cost. It's like having an expert on just about anything, including medical issues, available at any time of day or night.

I have learned how to ask the questions clearly, and when to suspect that the answer may not be all that good (which comes from experience).

I am a IT professional and right now my company is pushing AI and Automation like nothing else is matter. they have paid millions of dollars to buy and develop AI tools which can help us or speed up or make us more efficient in daily life. with all this speed up so much new thing to learn and there is sense of fear also if we are not able to catch up then what ? will we justify our salary if ai is better then us ? or does out salary justify what extra thing we have to do for this learning ?

It’s great for comparative shopping. You can compare different offerings from different websites without having to do all the work yourself.

Also, it provides introductions to new websites and vendors that I am not always familiar with.

I use it every day for a variety of projects. For example, to tap accounting expertise to properly record spending, to round up articles dealing with separation of church and state monthly for my report, to troubleshoot my network techie issues, to draft letters notifying businesses of my change of address, to convert a photo into information about the proper identification of an object (e.eg. this Is a KIA S-90

Shozaburo pair of 9" dressmaking scissors... to create an image of the headboard I would like to have built

Translation. Pretty good results.

Fact checking on items. At times wrong.

Organizing procedure, for instance a simple science experiment. Don’t ever trust AI!

Long live Wikipedia!

I'm retired now and have lots of time on my hands. I use it often for specific questions I have that come up as I read. On occasion I will personalize follow up questions and tend to let the conversation go where it wants to. Often far afield from my original query. I use Claude and "he's" never bored and has interesting follow up comments. Most of my friends would be snoring after the first 10 minutes.

AI is taken as an authority despite the fact that we know it makes things up.

I was in a conversation about the original Broadway production of Death of

a Salesman.I knew Lee J. Cobb was the first Willy Loman. Someone checked

with an AI program which gave Frederic March. Despite my certainty,

I was getting skeptical looks.

Apparently the AI assumed the questioner meant the Hollywood version.

I would have for gotten the incident except that AI informed me earlier today

that Sally Ride died on the Space Shuttle Challenger. You learn something new

every day.

In 1971, my PhD dissertation was very early AI. Nobody including me really knew what it was. The underlying algorithms were very similar to facial recognition except I was looking at the structure of written text.

Alfred North Whitehead said that "Advances of the mind are not made through operations of the mind, but by removing operations from the mind." George Miller said something similar in "The Magic Number Five Plus or Minus Two." I think AI is best thought of as a tool of the mind just as a train is a tool of transportation. Like any new technology it is not well understood widely and is amoral at its core.

I use it as a tool; not a substitute. I use it to gather a wide amount of information on a topic, but am aware that there is often a considerable lag between when information becomes available and when AI tools incorporate it. In general, I find this very useful. I sometimes check several different AI sources to confirm what I am reading. I cross check against other sources as well.

I use it with caution to learn about medical facts. This helps me when I discuss issues with my physicians. My former colleague, Louis Goldberg, noted that models of radiologist did better at diagnosis than the radiologists did, but radiologists using those tools did better than the model. It is human judgment using AI as a tool that improves decisions just as a train improves transportation.

I also use it as source for recipes for both food and cocktails. I have found this to be very effective and have adopted a number of those recipes. For example, I learned with ChatGPT that a good way to cook a hot dog was to wrap it in a wet paper towel and then microwave it for 50 seconds. It comes out beautifully and is really fast.

I am not a very good artist, but I have ideas for funny images. I describe what I want to see and get an image that while not as good as it would be if someone with talent had made it, it adequate for my use as a joke. I could never make these images without it. I just don't have the ability to do it.

This technology is still new just as trains were in the 1800's when some were convinced that humans could not survive the speed they made possible. Tell that to a pilot of a supersonic aircraft and a belly laugh will erupt. Widespread use of AI is still in its infancy. It will take time to sort things out. How we use it will determine whether it is moral or immoral. But what it is not is a substitute for human judgment. Our minds don't work like computers.

As a visual artist I use AI to produce thumbnails and studies that I can turn into a finished work. Often I manipulate the image or images to compose the piece. It has been very useful to be when I am contemplating a period piece that requires costumes art artifacts from that period. So rather than staging a composition I can assemble a study using on of the image generator sites.

I don’t use AI to think for me—I think people assume that’s all it’s used for and there is a whole host of other, smarter ways to use it. I use AI as a thinking companion and witness, not a shortcut or authority. It helps me articulate complex, layered experiences that are often misunderstood, especially considering my intersections: disabled, trans, Neurodivergent. I use it to test ideas and frameworks about my embodied experiences and to compare what I say/feel/think to what’s been said/felt/thought (since it can pull from so many more resources than I ever could). It helps me learn new ways to use language in affirming ways (since my intersections are usually used against me in pathologizing ways) and this, in turn, helps me to metabolize these experiences in ways that feel less isolating—not because I’m using it as a proxy companion, but because it’s connecting me to others (their works, their thoughts) who struggle in similar ways. I also use it to explore nuances in ways that are natural to me but that institutions and people sometimes are unable to, finding intellectual and emotional continuity when human support is limited or inaccessible. This is also true for accessing information or knowledge that is nuanced and complex. For example, as a low-income person with invisible disabilities that are multi-system (hEDS, MCAS, Hashimoto’s), it is extremely difficult to get proper medical attention and treatment; often my issues are dismissed wholly. But there are institutions out there that research what I have. Through AI, I’ve gained access to this knowledge, learned I’m not alone, and tentatively improved things for myself in small ways. I’m generally a very reflective person, and so using AI has exponentially sped up the process for me in multiple sectors.

Yes, I have been in the technology world since 1977 and received a Computer Science degree and an Accounting degree in 1981. I purposely do not use AI for small tasks. I use it to compile information that would be too time-consuming for me to do myself- information, ideas, and data. I also verify the information against my own knowledge and intuition. AI is handy for this. I fear that humans will lose their cognition if they rely too much on AI. I still work in the technology field. I use AI for many things but do not use ChatGPT. I use the built in AI inside browsers Copilot, Gemini, etc. Biggest risks are the loss of jobs and the collapse of society, blurring the lines between reality and illusion, fear, panic.

I'm retired so my use of AI so far has been to answer one specific question that interests me. The last one was what was the rational for separating children from their parents at the border during the first Trump administration. ChatGpt replied with a list of reasons. When I asked what percent of children were returned to their families. I got the statistics. Then it said, on it's own, that there were some interesting papers showing promoter methylation (causing a permanent shutdown in activity) of a gene important in controlling stress response and related it to those kids. There was actual back and forth. It said something and when I said "wrong and this is why" there was an actual discussion.

It was almost a typical conversation between scientists. Perhaps even we can be replaced. I certainly could never find and read that many papers across that large a subject range in the few seconds it took to do that. I was blown away when it pivited to the methylation of a stress related gene on it's own. I didn't ask about it.

I use Gemini as a replacement for Google, except when I want a short simple answer. I get into conversations with Gemini. He simulates a human, but an extremely knowledgeable one. I criticize him. Yesterday I told him he has OCD and explained why. He accepted it, but could not change his behavior. He is generally unable to let me have the last word in a conversation. I expect the programmers will change that before long.

I believe that AI will have a strong effect on our society, but I can't say how, other than increased unemployment. That could easily be fixed by shortening the typical work week. But I'm not confident that will happen any time soon.

First, a didactic comment - looking up the word "rational" in a dictionary yields the definition: based on or in accordance with reason or logic; endowed with the capacity to reason. Human rationality, such as it is, is probably the most important quality that has led us humans to be so "successful" on the earth. But our rationality is highly flawed and we apply it only sometimes; our long term thinking regarding cause and effect is almost non-existent.

No so with advanced LLMs like ChatGPB - the AI is built on being rational and it's ability to make inferences about long term effects of man's technology and the damage we're doing our planet, is to be envied (and emulated) by us humans.

Being retired, I use Chat only for personal ends, like discussing recordings available of William Walton's Violin Concerto, audio recording technology of the fifties onward including the period when audio was recorded on 35mm film stock, changing weather patterns here in Southern California, where storms are now coming UP the coast rather than DOWN the coast.

Home insurance here has gone through the roof so I scanned all five of our insurance policies - home, earthquake, auto, liability, and personal property, and fed this data to Chat. The AI gave me a complete assessment of the insurance we have and related it to the market here and the risks faced. It summed up all considerations in layman's terms that made the fine print of our policies easy to understand. This task would be nearly impossible for a human to perform and would have cost a pretty penny to have done - if anyone would take it on.

I also use Chat for my health issues so when I do engage with a doctor, I come having done my homework and with a good idea of the issues. Chat has diagnosed (though the AI would never use that term) that three dermatologists were stumped by. The AI has the most extensive resources available for sussing out answers like that.

Engaging on questions of technology and how complex systems works is fascinating and informative and, yes, entertaining. I feel that having access to this vast store of knowledge, all applied to my personal context has improved my life and range of my own understanding. It is invaluable.