Image by Jernej Furman, via Wikimedia Commons
It would be difficult to imagine the last couple of years without artificial intelligence, even if you don’t use it. Can you recall the last day without some AI-related news item or social-media post — or indeed, a time when the hype didn’t slide into utopian or apocalyptic terms? “If I look five or ten years down the road, it seems like we will be in a world in which the use of AI tools will not just be normal,” writes Justin Weinberg at Daily Nous, offering a more sober take. “Facility with them will be expected, and that expectation will inform the social and professional norms we’ll all be subject to, whether we like it or not.”
To his audience of philosophy academics, Weinberg poses a question: are you using AI? And furthermore, “Is there a particular kind of task you think you’d like to learn how to use AI for, but don’t know how?” Here at Open Culture, we’d like to ask something similar of our readers. If you use AI in your daily life in meaningful ways, what do you use it for? We’ve previously featured applications like OpenAI’s text-generating ChatGPT and image-generating DALL‑E, both of which have astonished users with the rapidity of their evolution. Now, tools promising “the power of AI” proliferate daily across ever more diverse fields of human endeavor.
For many of us, AI has thus far amounted to little more than a technology with which to amuse ourselves, albeit a very impressive one. I myself have laughed as hard at AI-generated stories as I have at anything else over the past year or two, though much depends on the thought I put into the prompts. But I’ve also heard the occasional story of genuine benefit that an AI tool has brought to someone’s personal or professional life, whether by clearly explaining a long-misunderstood concept, filling the gaps in a child’s education, or helping to determine what kind of care to seek for a medical problem.
If you have any such experiences yourself, please do leave a comment on this post telling us about them — and don’t forget to mention what variety of AI you’re using. Open Culture readers may well be getting real mileage out of AI “for summarizing complex academic texts, translating historical documents, or exploring philosophy, literature, and science more deeply”; for generating “poetry, music composition, or visual art in the vein of historical and avant-garde styles”; or for “practice with foreign languages, whether through translation, conversation, or grammar correction.” At least, that’s what ChatGPT thinks. Look forward to reading your thoughts in the comments below.
Related content:
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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I use ai to write scripts to quickly organize data, run stats, and do graphs in R. I have certainly learn new strategies/shortcuts that are often more succinct. Another way I use ai is in proofreading scientific manuscripts.
Minimally. Duck Duck Go, presents an AI answer called Assist. I use it because it gives me a quick answer to a question. No more reading articles and learning more about a subject.
I use ChatGPT and Perplexity daily and some others from time to time. I sometimes repeat the same prompt. My most rewarding experience is self — evaluation. Example: I fed in 15 pages of notes I wrote after 30+/- live musical concerts and ask it to observe common concerns. It came back with stunningly lucid portrayal of me which I can’t imagine how I would get that other way.
I don’t use AI at all. AI’s nature to approximate an answer at times means I don’t trust it and the creative tools AI can offer are all things I would rather do myself because I enjoy the process. Like if I search for a recipe, and I get an AI’s approximation that’s basically a soup when what I actually asked for was a Sourdough Bread Recipe, how can I trust these things?
Me not using it however doesn’t mean I’m anti-AI, I don’t really care if people use it to be honest.
My biggest issue that is actually annoying me is the ever increasing forced AI functions. Wish these companies would stop forcing it. My android phone seems to tell me about Gemini every other week, I’ve had to use a third-party extension to remove the AI results from my Google searches, Twitter keeps plugging grok and how I can use it to edit my posts, etc, etc. On paper these things are fine but I can’t turn them off, I apparently HAVE to be told about them every time.
Barring the unpaid use of real people’s voiceprints, I think improved text-to-speech (and speech-to-text) is among the BEST uses of AI. It’s not possible, workload-wise OR funding-wise, to get live human performance of all the reading-aloud that needs to be done, and so AI TTS is a very important accessibility tool that addresses a genuine unmet need — a holy grail the grifters trying to shove AI into absolutely everything to make stonks go up can only dream of.
I use Perplexity and Google’s AI Studio virtually every day. Having been a web nerd since 1997, I recognize that one of the best uses for good AI is as a search engine. With a good prompt, you can gather information from multiple sources, read explanations for why this code or that data might be unreliable, and so on. As a web designer, I use it to help me simplify code and correct my syntax.
Very useful.
I use ChatGPT daily for things like:
o writing client emails (for batch emails, not individual emails) using my style of writing
o generating Excel formulas
o generating code blocks in C#, Python, etc.
o generating tables of information I am curious about (historical data, statistical data, etc.)
o planning travel itineraries
o practicing my German skills and expanding my vocabulary
o occasional math problems
o conversion of units (weight, mass, distance, etc.)
o generating custom images
That’s just a partial list.
I try to be as precise as I can to get the results I want in my preferred format (usually tables) and ask ChatGPT to include its references/sources and degree of confidence in its answer.
But I always double check the answers because they are not always correct.
I don’t use it at all, because I hate it. I’ll be honest and tell you I also really don’t like that you wrote this. I like this site so here’s hoping (probably in vain) that this doesn’t come up again.
Like Eighth I really resent that people have decided these pathological liar plagiarist imaginary friends are something we all really deeply desire and we’re all waiting to use them. Stinks like VC money.
One of the best uses I saw was to generate suggested alternate texts for images posted on social networks. t2/Pebble did this. They also tried the worst use, generating posts when you can’t think of what to say. That was absurd.
Hi everyone! I like that your community is chatting about how AI can be useful.
We made an AI kitchen assistant called BakeBot — it can answer any cooking question, modify any recipe, it remembers your preferences (so you don’t have to say “make it vegan, gluten-free,” etc, scan old recipe cards and it can use your camera to see what you see and give you recipe ideas based on what’s in the fridge, pantry or grocery aisle.
You can try it at (with a preview of the “vision” tool)— https://:bakebotpro.com/vision
It’s new and I’m the co-founder — I’d love to hear what you think.
Thanks for the article and requests for how people use it. I use it often — and in ways that help me exercise my mind rather than this fiction-fantasy of expecting an omniscient presence to do my thinking for me.
I find it interesting when people who’ve made up their minds about something they perceive as awful, it automatically becomes something that’s somehow thrust on them. Yes, we can blame uncontrolled aspects of capitalism for all kinds of things shoved under our noses, but blaming the tech for this is like blaming the library for having so many books that you can’t relate to and/or would never read.
The frustration or fear people express about something that creates a system of synergetic fabrications might be rooted in deeper issues — such as information overload, loss of control over personal narratives, or a sense of disempowerment in the face of overwhelming systemic forces rather than the technology per se.
When we expect absolute perfection from any tool, we set ourselves up for disappointment. In contrast, by embracing the inherent limitations of these systems, we open up space for a more dynamic interplay between human insight and machine efficiency. This approach not only enriches our problem-solving capabilities but also encourages continuous learning and adaptation.
Cooking 100%. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but getting a simple recipe on the world wide web has become a shitty experience. I routinely talk to chat gpt as I cook — it’s great with step by step instructions and offers up some creative ideas.
Has any of the propagators of AI given a thought to the undeniable fact of uneven development all around the Globe? Consider any of these people, in less developed regions there is simply no electricity? Sure, robotic and technical activity may be supported by data all generated and consructed by the HUMAN into softweres utilizing this method for ease everyday work,
But, what about the highly different cultural background, education- intelligence level of the crowd? Finally, how would a digital system capable to describe and make “suggestions” in the region of higher quality topics which are singularly and exclusively characteristic for the HUMAN, like emotions, spiritual notions, generally: ART, originality in music, abstract depictions, etc?
This is really cool. Last year I knocked up something similar where I vectorized my entire cookbook library, and created a few agents to do things like image generation. I then just wrapped all this together with a couple of AI’s via API and created a cool app that could take inputs (e.g. what is in my fridge/pantry, what I feel like eating, my cooking skills, etc.) and generate unique recipes with pictures for each step. I’ve cooked some amazing stuff this way.
To the question of this article, my favorite AI feature is the lack of barriers compared to prior tech waves. With some tech skills, it is so incredibly easy to knock up fully-featured Proof of Concepts that help in solving real-world problems. My cooking PoC took me a weekend to build on my own!