How I use AI (almost) daily

ChatGPT has been around for a couple years now. I'm a tech guy, my job title is DevOps Engineer for crying out loud, so I get wind of these new techs as soon as they get out of their Silicon Valley incubator somewhere. The rise of AI overlords has been on the horizon for a couple years now, but ChatGPT really took the world by storm. I dabbled with it left and right, but it wasn't until recently that I've started using it pretty much daily.

Here's some ways in which I use generative AI regularly:

A Better Google

I don't Google anymore, I ask ChatGPT. He does a better job at finding the answer and summarizing it. There's also no ads, and if ChatGPT doesn't instantly give me the right answer, I can easily tweak it. For instance: a while ago I heard the song 'One of These Days' by Pink Floyd in a trailer for a TV show, I heard it before, my dad's a big Pink Floyd fan, the CDs were constantly playing while driving in the car. So I asked Google: "Pink floy song with bass intro", and all it gave me were results about 'Time', which, granted, is also a Pink Floyd song that starts with bass, but it's not the one I'm looking for. Asking the same thing on ChatGPT, and it responds with 'Time', in the next prompt say: "No, that's not the one I'm looking for", and what do you know, it spits out the track that I'm interested in!

I was looking for a couple speakers for my desk and wondering if they fit. On Google you can find the dimensions, buried in some tech specs sometimes. ChatGPT just gives the dimensions to me, no need to dive into the tech specs, and it even generates a mockup image of the speakers standing on my desk, so I can visually judge if they won't be too crowded.

Music Recommendation Machine

I hate the Spotify algorithm, it just spits out more of the same, and sometimes I want to explore different things. Then there's sites like Pitchfork, Bandcamp, ... But they're only focussed on new music releasing, not really on classics. Top 50 lists are boring as well, I've heard most of that. Enter ChatGPT: I ask it for recommendations, and then I give it feedback: I don't really like rap, rnb, techno, but I do like rock, alt, jazz, classical, etc. If I'm in the mood for something heavy, I ask for it, and it delivers. It even asks if I want to go of the beaten path and experiment heavily, or stay relatively safe. It's like talking to a librarian or record shop owner. They shout recommendations and you can actually talk to them instead of just having to rely on some anonymous person on the internet shouting: "This is my top list"

Drawing Tutor

So, I'm learning to draw, and following some tutorials, but there's some things I don't really understand, so I ask ChatGPT. It then explains, shows examples, and gives me drawing prompts and a lesson schedule. I can then take pictures of the exercises I did, and it judges then and gives me recommendations of areas I need to improve upon: "hey your darks can be darker, but you're really learning to gradually make tones here, especially in that area of your photo!". It's such a great tutor, it never gets angry, and it ever so slightly pushes you outside your comfort zone by recommending new things to try and do.

Code Generator

When I started out as a DevOps engineer about 10 years ago, you searched Google for something, then read the documentation of the tool you were working with, found somebody on Tech Overflow with same issue, then cobbled together a working solution by copy/pasting code from those sources. You then tried to make it run, only to make it fail because in one part of the code you were using 'foobar' and in another part of the code you were using 'foobars' or 'Foobar' and you then had to spend a couple hours figuring out where you made a typo. Just write code, when it fails, copy the code into ChatGPT and the error message, and it'll immediately spit out where you made a mistake, better than your coding environment does. Or even better, just ask it to write the code you want by describing the inputs and outputs and what it should do. Then tell it where it is wrong, where it needs to check additional inputs etc. It's like talking to a junior developer, walking them through how to write this code. You know what you want to achieve, you've broken it down into parts, you just need to figure out how exactly to do a request to an API with Python. You've done it millions of times in Ruby, Bash, C, Java, but this project uses Python so, instead of learning Python, or whatever the next great coding language is, and instead of copy/pasting from the docs or Stack Overflow, just ask ChatGPT...

Bonus

Wow, you made it this far! Bonus topic: you can ask ChatGPT to write blogpost articles! But that's something I don't do! I actually like to write stuff. It helps me process, I think it's fun! And ChatGPT wouldn't ramble the way that I ramble!