How Do You Use AI in Your Daily Life? Share the Applications That Have Made a Big Difference

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:

Google Launch­es a New Course Called “AI Essen­tials”: Learn How to Use Gen­er­a­tive AI Tools to Increase Your Pro­duc­tiv­i­ty

Sci-Fi Writer Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dict­ed the Rise of Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence & the Exis­ten­tial Ques­tions We Would Need to Answer (1978)

Google & MIT Offer a Free Course on Gen­er­a­tive AI for Teach­ers and Edu­ca­tors

Unlock AI’s Poten­tial in Your Work and Dai­ly Life: Take a Pop­u­lar Course from Google

Noam Chom­sky on Chat­G­PT: It’s “Basi­cal­ly High-Tech Pla­gia­rism” and “a Way of Avoid­ing Learn­ing”

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.