Ask HN: I don't use AI. What exactly am I missing out on?

I have recently been using chatgpt to estimate calories from pictures or descriptions. The few times I've checked, it's pretty accurate and is OK about providing ranges where it's uncertain.

I also ask it to tally calories for a day. It's got a chart of calories accumulated for me. It's so much easier than any app.

I often use copilot to avoid looking up syntax for things I should remember. I'll just comment / ask what I'm trying to do and it'll tab-complete that line. I rarely use it for boilerplate or larger amounts of code. But that one use saves me tons of time and context switches and is totally worth it.

I use ChatGPT for rough fermi-style questions. "How much does a cell phone weigh" etc. So much quicker than google, and better.

I often use ChatGPT to have an interactive learning session about surface details of a field I'm interested in. It allows me to find hooks into wikipedia or other search engines for specific topics to read more about, and to get questions answered quickly. It is second to none for this type of interaction and is really incredible.

Midjourney has taken hours of my life the last day or two. I love generating images in the style of this or that. For example, I'm creating schematics / blueprints for flying warships from the game highfleet, and printing them because they look cool. It adds some nerdy flair to my office. When I worked for NASA, my colleagues would do that for rover parts they've worked on, so I like the idea of capturing video game stuff as though it were important. If midjourney had a "buy print" button on it, it'd be dangerous and lucrative.

I feel like there's a couple startup ideas in this post.

These tailored answers can even be tailored to different perspectives. You simply ask for the perspective you're looking for. E.g. "what is the problem with solar farms from a Republican perspective?"

But yes, one also needs to take care because due to how an AI is trained, they may have an innate bias and viewpoint even when asking for a different one. I've found that such "personal" points of view in conflict with some other are usually made pretty clear though if you're asking for another view. So it doesn't use to be hard to separate the two as both are plainly and separately made available in the reply if this happens.

But yeah, that's basically it for me. Tailored answers to my questions, as well as the generation aspect of course, where it can generate text or image content which Google can't.

1. Generating config files: Eg, Webpack, Docker-compose. Describe your use-case and it will generate the config file you need. This is usually faster than perusing docs and looking for specific flags/options.

2. Generating CLI syntax: jq, cat, tar, find. The flags/syntax are so hard to remember when you want to do something specific. ChatGPT does a great job here in quickly generating the command you want.

3. Solving problems when you're stuck: When I feel stuck with a problem or an error message, ChatGPT has proven to be an invaluable resource. Even when the answer it gave was wrong, a little hint in there was enough for me to find the solution I needed.

4. Generating functions you're too lazy to write: Often, you know how to write a function but you're too damn lazy to write it. Eg, use axios, go to this URL, get the contents and write it to CSV. Writing a function to do this feels like a chore. ChatGPT is a helpful assistant in this case.

Overall, I think there are plenty of ways the tool can save you time, even if you're skeptical about changing your whole workflow.