Ask HN: How have you applied AI in your life, work or hobbies?

AI has had a mainstream introduction in the form of ChatGPT this year. I use GPT a lot for all kinds of small tasks.

I'm looking for concrete use-cases where people are applying AI models and tools in real-life scenarios.

For example, at work we found a benefit to use an AI-based image removal tool for poor-quality product photos sent in by our customers.

There's a lot of hype out there, and lots of demos. I'd love to know where you're really getting use out of it!

I've been using it to give it the rulesets or general concepts to video games I'm designing and asking it for ideas for special powers or cards, or providing it with an overall theme and asking it to generate ideas for how to apply that theme to the ruleset or game concept. It provides a lot of junk ideas, but enough useful ideas that I keep asking it. Something another game designer said that I agree with is that it's 'about the same as a playtester tossing out a random idea.'

You have to evaluate it to see if it fits your goals, and work out the details and prototype and playtest it, but sometimes just seeing those ideas can get you unstuck or enhance the design or spark another idea which works even better. And some of those ideas I know I would never think of, and probably never get them from a playtester, so I'm thankful for them.

Also used it recently when my wife was feeling stuck in the motivations for certain people in her book, I gave it a paragraph overview and asked it to come up with motivations and it provided quite a few, including about six or seven we had previously tossed around and discussed. She was skeptical beforehand but was more impressed afterwards, in particular because it provided a bit of validation that the ideas we were tossing around weren't bad ideas.

Just this morning I asked it for what tools within Azure cloud tech to use for accomplishing a programming task, and the information it provided me seemed a bit more useful than me asking other experienced users in our organization as well as a few videos and articles I read (because it was able to provide an idea more directly applicable to our specific use case). Even provided some sample code.

I've been working on using OpenAI to manage (organize, auto-respond, etc) my inbound recruiting emails. I think the same could be applied to sales emails.

It's been a ton of fun. I'm basically using AI automation to fight AI automation :)

You can follow along at: https://sharedrecruiting.co/

I've been using ChatGPT as a brainstorming assistant/Google replacement for stuff I don't know how to find. For simple document retrieval (blogs, documentation, etc) I find search to be far superior still, but ChatGPT shines when I'm trying to figure out what I don't know I don't know.

There's a quote, apparently by Donald Rumsfeld (TIL) that reads “There are known knowns, things we know that we know; and there are known unknowns, things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns, things we do not know we don't know.” I find the known knowns and known unknowns are well served by traditional web search, but ChatGPT and similar tech can help me explore the unknown unknowns.

I’ve been using ChatGPT to help generate sentences for an interactive/dialog-based virtual Chinese tutor [0].

The sentences still need human vetting as it will occasionally get things wrong, but it’s a massive productivity multiplier. I’m mostly happy that it’s available via API so I can stop endlessly copying and pasting.

If you consider speech recognition/synthesis “AI”, then I try heavily on that too. I did. dabble with using Stable Diffusion to generate images to assist learning. That shows promise but it’s not a priority at the moment so I left it.

[0] https://polyvox.app