When I search this topic online, I always find either wrong information or advertising lies. So what is actually something that LLMs can do very well, as in being actually useful and not just outputing a nonsensical word salad that sounds coherent.
Results
So basically from what I’ve read, most people use it for natural language processing problems.
Example: turn this infodump into a bullet point list, or turn this bullet point list into a coherent text, help me with rephrasing this text, word association, etc.
Other people use it for simple questions that it can answer with a database of verified sources.
Also, a few people use it as struggle duck, basically helping alleviate writers block.
Thanks guys.
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.
kill time
Not exactly sure this is the “right way” to use them, but I use one as an autocomplete helper in my IDE. I don’t ask it to code anything, just use it as autocomplete.
Majority of the time, it works well, especially in common languages like Python.
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.
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.”
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?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:
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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.
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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.
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Converting a stream of thought bullet list into a well written communication.
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I ask it increasingly absurd riddles and laugh when it hallucinates and tells me something even more absurd.
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.
While this is something LLMs are decent at, I feel this is only of value if your notes are unstructured, and it presents infosec concerns.
I guess my notes are unstructured, as in they’re what I type as I’m in the meeting. I’m a “more is better” sort of note taker, so it’s definitely faster to let AI pull things out.
Infosec … I guess people will have to evaluate that for themselves. Certainly, for my use case there’s no concern.
I record meetings of my building’s board of management, nothing secret there, very mundane. I run it through Whisper and give the transcript to ChatGPT. It condenses everything into accurate minutes, resolutions and action items. Saves me a shit ton of work, finished in seconds. I’m never going back!
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
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.
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.
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.
Very basic and non-creative source code operations. Eg. “convert this representation of data to that representation of data based on the template”
