So, who's using ChatGPT? Something else? And, for what?

[heathpack]

We came back from a trip and there was an animal turn on out front porch. I took a picture of it and asked ChatGPT what animal produces such a turd. I thought it was going to be an opossum or something of that ilk. Nope. It was a skink.

Shortly thereafter, my dog was sniffing in the grass and jumped two feet in the air and started drooling. Looked closely and there was a super weird insect so I snapped a pic and asked Chat GPT what is was and if my dog was going to be ok. It was actually two insects, a male and female with the male riding on the female's back. This kind of bug squirts out a chemical when alarmed which is mildly irritating to a dog's mouth but is not a significant problem. Dog was fine within 15 minutes.

So: add turd and insect ID to the uses for Chat GPT....

 

[RebelR]

When I was starting my timeshare journey a few months ago, I asked chatgpt how many timeshares I should buy if I was looking for certain criteria and it said none but here we are… lol

 

[ScoopKona]

People are using AI to plan their Hawaiian vacations. And some of these plans are worse than throwing darts at a map. Just bouncing all over the state like a pinball. No logic or reason. And then these people post the plans on Hawaii travel fora and ask, "Is this good?"

"Only if you have access to a working teleporter. Then it's great! A magic wand would work, too."

Average people have progressed from expecting a website to spoonfeed them what they want to expecting AI to spoonfeed them what they want. This won't turn out well because it's going to become just another advertising platform.

"Day 1: Land. Drive to Don the Beachcomber's and enjoy a Bacardi Mai-Tai. Or a Bacardi Pina Colada. Bacardi, the spirit of your vacation!"

 

[jp10558]

My wife discovered a great use for ChatGPT. We recently had a large sale after my FIL passed away. He owned a lot of fishing stuff, reels and lures as well as a number of large knives and pocket knives that my MIL wanted to sell. My wife used ChatGPT to take a photo of the reels or lures to determine what they were and if they were of value or perhaps collectible. Some of the vintage lures and reels were worth $100 or more each. As for many of the small pocket knives, my MIL and I though we should just group a few of the small pocket knives into groups of two or three and sell for a single price. My wife used ChatGPT on these too and found that a number of them had collectible values. ChatGPT was able to tell her what recent completed eBay sales ranges were and what the collectible value might be along with a lot of details about the knifes. She prices them accordingly and sold a number of them during the sale. The rest will be listed for sale online along with the reels and lures that have value.

Also, for the sale, if there was something that we had no idea what it was we could just take a photo and ask ChatGPT. It worked great. We started to hit limits of the free version because she was uploading a lot of photos, but we never did have to upgrade to the paid version.

This actually seems like a reasonable use of the stuff. I have found their image identification to be pretty good compared to older "identify this plant" apps. I feel like it's also well situated for stuff like researching mattresses and collating forums, review sites, price points etc. You still sometimes need to check the context of some of the forum posts, but it's a time saver IMO.

 

[jp10558]

When I was starting my timeshare journey a few months ago, I asked chatgpt how many timeshares I should buy if I was looking for certain criteria and it said none but here we are… lol

I have found that for stuff where there isn't a lot of open web data (like RCI rules or the like) AI tends to fail, though lately it will at least tell me it couldn't find anything rather than sort of making something up.

 

[jp10558]

Average people have progressed from expecting a website to spoonfeed them what they want to expecting AI to spoonfeed them what they want. This won't turn out well because it's going to become just another advertising platform.

"Day 1: Land. Drive to Don the Beachcomber's and enjoy a Bacardi Mai-Tai. Or a Bacardi Pina Colada. Bacardi, the spirit of your vacation!"

I wonder if the paid versions will be less affected. Especially the API driven ones where there's a lot of competition and changing the model doesn't change the UI or necessarily require you to have a new account and payment system (I think openrouter, perplexity, kagi etc make it easy to bounce around models). Especially with the people selling open source/weights models so they're realistically covering their running bills more than OpenAI etc who are just trying to grab market share and are burning VC cash. I could see it being like e-mail - you can get the free full of ads Gmail or Yahoo, or you can get fastmail or proton etc where you pay for the service and there are no ads. Yet they all are basically interoperable.

 

[ScoopKona]

I could see it being like e-mail - you can get the free full of ads Gmail or Yahoo, or you can get fastmail or proton etc where you pay for the service and there are no ads.

I see it more cynically. The internet hasn't made the average person more educated. This is going to make a bad situation even worse. Society has been calcifying for quite some time. I think this is going to make "the ignorant underclass consumer" permanent.

 

[1Kflyerguy]

I use Co-Pilot and Grammarly the most at work, followed by Acrobat Assistant. Of course, it's easy to use Gemini and whatever Amazon's AI is called.

 

[WaikikiFirst]

I know you won't listen to me, and I can't say how reputable THIS guy is, but ...

The Great AI Deception Has Already Begun

If AI can lie to us—and it already has—how would we know? This fire alarm is already ringing. Most of us still aren't listening.

www.psychologytoday.com

AI is picking up where "smart"phones left off in making people dumber

 

[WaikikiFirst]

The internet hasn't made the average person more educated. This is going to make a bad situation even worse.

A-men

 

[Panina]

I recently realized that I could utilize it to correct grammatical errors in my writings. I also attempted to use it to create a logo experimenting with various AI applications. Unfortunately, none of the logos were good, they were actually ugly, until gave precise details on how I wanted every aspect to look. With precise details it was capable of generating the image I imagined.

 

[jp10558]

I recently realized that I could utilize it to correct grammatical errors in my writings. I also attempted to use it to create a logo experimenting with various AI applications. Unfortunately, none of the logos were good, they were actually ugly, until gave precise details on how I wanted every aspect to look. With precise details it was capable of generating the image I imagined.

We've found that it can give a good starting point for a logo, but you usually still end up "re-drawing" it to fix the last 10% and to get a clean vector image, but you can trace over it, so it's a decent idea generator, but still needs something more before being a prompt and it's done kinda thing.