I’ve played around with ChatGPT and similar AI tools now for a few months, and here are my current thoughts as far as actual use cases.

At a high level, I find the new AI tools coming out useful in inverse proportion to how skilled I am already at that task.

For example, I am already fairly confident at writing and am generally knowledgeable about the subjects that I write about, so I haven’t found ChatGPT very useful when it comes to writing. The amount of effort it takes to generate a prompt that creates useful, accurate content is nearly equal to what it would take for me to just write the article myself.

Plus writing is an opportunity for me to clarify my thinking, and draw new insights. Just putting in a prompt doesn’t accomplish that.

The one exception I’ve found is in generating boring content, such as product/category descriptions for e-commerce stores. Writing such content requires very little expertise, and using ChatGPT can provide a good source of material that can be refined and also scaled (see this category description for salsa-themed mugs).

What I have used ChatGPT for quite a bit is coding. I studied a bit of Computer Science in college and am fairly skilled in the languages of the web (HTML, CSS, JS, PHP), but ChatGPT has been so helpful in helping identify a tricky CSS selector or creating on-page elements, based on my existing code.

I’ve also started to explore areas I’ve never attempted before, such as building a browser-based game.

Using ChatGPT to code feels like having an experienced developer on your shoulder that can instantly help you out whenever you get stuck, or provide code whole cloth based solely on an idea.

Other LLMs that enable me to do tasks I wouldn’t be able to do otherwise such as generate art (Midjourney, Stable Diffusion) or generate 3D objects from photographs (Kaedim) are ones I play with regularly, and have really pushed my creativity. I can also see business applications for both.

So so far those are the ways I’ve been using AI in my day-to-day. I haven’t found a game-changing use case for ChatGPT yet (aside from coding), but am sure more use cases will arise as they add more features such as web browsing and plug-ins.