The main practical use I’ve found for me is writing a personalized cover letters when applying for jobs. Just plug in the job description, edit as needed, and off it goes. The way I see it, if HR can use it for their purposes, so can I.

I use them to worsen my personal impact on climate change, since those things are consuming vast quantities of energy. It makes me feel more manly to know that I’m contributing to the slow destruction of our habitat every time I use them. It’s like having a second SUV to go to the closest corner store multiple times a day. These changed my life for the better, made it easier, and I can’t live without them now.

For science texts I sometimes need to rephrase sections of text. A perfect task for our in house chatgpt. I’ll give it a quick glance afterwards to see if the content is still the same but honestly it never let me down when I used it correctly.

Then also sometimes I try to look up things and I just ask chatgpt a question and to give me citations for their answer. That stuff only works in 1/3 cases which is a shame.

I mainly use LLMs as a programming assistant, as a brainstorming buddy and creative assistant while working on adventures for the tabletop roleplaying campaigns I run, and as a search result summarizer/interpreter over at Bing for the sorts of generic queries I used to use Google for.

I use it as a way to rewrite emails to sound more professional, especially when I’m too lazy to word good, or I’m mad at the person I’m emailing. I can say what I really want and have AI tone it down, or smarten it up.

I use it a lot for helping structure written reports. I can’t use exactly what it spits out, of course, but it helps me get an idea of what reads well and what doesn’t. It’s made me a better writer, I’m still bad, but getting better.

Helps with trouble shooting common or obscure IT issues in a pinch, not always right, but tends to point me the right direction. It’s great at reminding me about steps I skipped over. Also helps explain underlying technical causes.

I use it to explain certain industries, sciences, and technical reasons behind specific technologies I don’t have enough experience with, medical, biotech, IT, industrial, chemistry etc. Why would they use this vs that, what are reasons why they would or world not.

Jargon translator! If you want to learn a subject but you’re eyes glaze over at all of the jargon, ask an AI. I feel like there isn’t a topic I can’t learn now. If I don’t understand something I just copy and paste it in and say Explain. Anything I still don’t get I can ask for more details or a comprehensive breakdown. There isn’t a level of abstraction it can’t get to. Works just as well in reverse like when I want to quickly turn my explanation into something someone else will understand. Cross department communication is much easier, same for explaining something up the chain. My favorite is to have it explain things to the execs in layman terms.

Using AI feels like having my own smart…thing .alien .gnome by my side, or an extra lobe in my brain. I feel like I’m making new connections and learning faster than I would have without it. I think a big part of that has been my initial double checking ALL of it’s answers. That gave me a good feel for it’s weaknesses and strengths, when to doubt it, double check, or know when it’s just saying what sounds correct. I started using it day one every day, it’s definitely improved but still has a ways to go.

Finally, simple scripts. Anything more than that and I end up wasting too much time debugging.

Bedtime stories. Kids list anything they want in the story, as silly as they can come up with, and in seconds we have a short story to giggle to.

There are probably more, but those are the ones that came to mind. I want to list the things it’s absolutely terrible at too but another time.

Edit: typos