I use it for lots of stuff where I'm not an expert, or that are low stakes. I don't use it for the "core" of my job, but there are many things that are not "core" and still eat up a lot of time, in fact, most of my workday would be in this category. Some typical examples from my daily life as a university professor:
- Writing Python scripts to make charts out of Excel sheets, and then refine them. I could do it myself, but I would need to learn a library like Seaborn or similar which honestly is not especially intellectually stimulating, and then spend nontrivial amounts of time iterating on the actual code. With LLMs it's a breeze.
- Working with cumbersome LaTeX formatting, e.g. transposing a table, removing a column from a table, etc.
- Getting the tone just right in a professional email written in English to someone I don't know much (I'm not a native speaker so this is not trivial).
- Finding resources on topics that are tangential to what I do. For example, yesterday I needed to come up with some statistics on English words for a presentation I'm preparing, and I needed a free corpus where I could search for an n-gram and get frequencies of next words. I don't usually work with that kind of resource, it was just a one-off need. I asked for corpora of that kind and got a useful answer instantly. The manual process would probably have implied going through several options only to find that I needed a license or that they didn't provide the specific statistics I needed.
- Brainstorming on titles for scientific papers, presentations, names of concepts that you introduce on a paper, variable names, etc.
- Shortening a sentence in a paper that makes me go over the page limit, or polishing the English in a paragraph.
- Summarizing a text if I'm kind of interested in knowing the gist but have no time to read it whole.
- Answering quick questions on basic things that I forget, e.g. the parameters to make a Linux folder into a tar.gz. Man is too verbose and it takes time to sort the wheat from the chaff, Google is full of SEOd garbage these days and sometimes you need to skim a lot to find the actual answer, LLMs are much faster.
- Writing bureaucratic boilerplate, the typical texts with no real value but that you have to write (e.g. gender perspective statement on a grant request).
- Coming up with exam questions. This is a rather repetitive activity and they're fantastic at it. At my place we also have two official languages and we need to have exam assignments on both languages, guess who does the translation now (respecting LaTeX formatting, which previous machine translation tools typically wouldn't do).
- As an example of a one-off thing, the other day I had to edit a Word document which was password-protected. I asked ChatGPT how to unlock it and it not only answered, but actually did it for me (after 3 tries, but still, much faster than the time it would have taken for me to find out how to do it and then actually do it).
These are just some examples where they contribute (greatly) to my productivity at work. In daily life, I also ask them lots of questions.