Taking a natural language question and providing a foothold on a subject by giving you the vocabulary so that you can research a topic on your own.

"What is it called when xyz."

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.

Very basic and non-creative source code operations. Eg. "convert this representation of data to that representation of data based on the template"

I find it’s really good for asking extremely specific code questions

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 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

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 help me come up with better wording for things. A few examples:

• 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.

• 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.

• Converting a stream of thought bullet list into a well written communication.

I ask it increasingly absurd riddles and laugh when it hallucinates and tells me something even more absurd.

kill time

I have it make me excel formulas that I know are possible, but I can't remember the names or makeup for. Afterwords I always ask "what's a better way to display this data?" And I sometimes get a good response. Because of data security reasons I dont give it any real data but we have an internal one I can use for such things and I sometimes throw spreadsheets in for random queries that I can make in plain language.

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?

I find they're pretty good at some coding tasks. For example, it's very easy to make a reasonable UI given a sample JSON payload you might get from an endpoint. They're good at doing stuff like crafting farily complex SQL queries or making shell scripts. As long as the task is reasonably focused, they tend to get it right a lot of the time. I find they're also useful for discovering language features working with languages I'm not as familiar with. I also find LLMs are great at translation and transcribing images. They're also useful for summaries and finding information within documents, including codebases. I've found it makes it a lot easier to search through papers where you might want to find relationships between concepts or definitions for things. They're also good at subtitle generation and well as doing text to speech tasks. Another task I find they're great at is proofreading and providing suggestions for phrasing. They can also make a good sounding board. If there's a topic you understand, and you just want to bounce ideas off, it's great to be able to talk through that with a LLM. Often the output it produces can stimulate a new idea in my head. I also use LLM as a tutor when I practice Chinese, they're great for doing free form conversational practice when learning a new language. These are a just a few areas I use LLMs in on nearly daily basis now.

I use it for helping me learn German but only for explaining things like grammatical rules, concepts, or word uses.

Do not ask it to translate or write something for you. It will make lots of grammatical mistakes. I find that it often misgenders or uses the wrong case for nouns in a sentence.

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.

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:

• scammers, who can now write more personalize emails and also have conversations

• personality tests

• 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:

• substitute for therapy

• 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.

Overcoming writers block or whatever you want to call it

Like writing an obit or thank you message that doesn't sound stupid. I just need a sentence down to work from, even though it doesn't make it to final draft.

Or I needed to come up with activities to teach 4th graders about aerodynamics for a STEM outreach thing. None of the output from LLM was usable as it was spit out but was enough for me to kickstart real ideas

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.

They work well when being correct doesn't matter

JIRA queries, rules, automations, etc. Suggestions for how to make my rage-fueled communications sound more reasonable and professional Meeting Summaries. Not having to take notes is HUGE.

I was surprised how effective it was for getting a checklist of things I should do to get a car that hasn't been running for 30 years back on the road and asking for instructions for each step and things I should keep in mind

Outside of that it's become a Google replacement for software development questions

You do kinda have to know about the things you ask it about so you can spot when it's bullshiting you

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.

When I'm in a hurry I use them for

• longer more complex excel formulas.
• to create powercell scrips to manipulate large csv-files.

Database queries, especially OpenSearch/ElasticSearch

They help me make better searches. I use ChatGPT to get a good idea of what better to search for based on my inquiry. It tells me what I am looking for, and then just use a search engine based on that.

Also, taught me some python and appscript. Currently learning and testing its capabilities in JavaScript teaching. And, yes I test out everything it gives me. It is best to output small blocks of code and lice it together. Hoping for the best and then, 3 years later finally create an app lol because that is on my end. Still working on an organization app. 80 percent accurate on following complete directions in this case.

I use it for coding templates. Like build a basic mvc crud then I'll fill in the blanks.

None of the models are very good at the whole picture, but they save me time. I've tried to do more but it just lies about libraries that dont exist.

Website building

I havent really used any in a serious manner. I did install DeepSeek on my PC to try out. Its pretty fun to play with, but still seems to have issues. For example, I was using it to create bread recipes and fine tune proportions to get the exact amount of dough I need. I found that its math was way off, and would give me wildly different results even when asked the same question and given the same requirements.

Im not sure how ChatGPT compares, as I dont have access to it and Im not really willing to pay for it.