3 months ago
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Artificial intelligence seems to be either set to transform the world beyond all recognition or collapse in on itself. It’s hard to get a clear perspective on just how useful or otherwise this rapidly expanding tech is, though it’s fair to say that a lot of the ideas being floated at the moment sound pretty uninspiring.
Part of the issue in assessing AI is the sheer breadth of ways it’s used. Most recently, we have been thinking of generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Midjourney. Still, AI algorithms are also getting you from A to B in Google Maps, choosing the posts you see on Instagram, and working behind the scenes across all kinds of different apps and sites.
If you’re struggling to find any genuine use cases for AI, give these ones a try—you might find they can boost your productivity and creativity, at least until the AI bubble pops under the weight of copyright claims, exorbitant processing costs, and a lack of novel training data.
Summarizing text
Tools like ChatGPT and Gemini are very good at taking large blocks of text, picking out the most important points, and condensing them down to more digestible summaries. This can work with PDF documents, emails, webpages, notes, and anything else (and it’s a feature being built into more apps and tools).
In these cases, the AI is working with a fixed batch of words, so inaccuracies and hallucinations should be less of a problem. However, they can still happen—double-check anything that’s important by asking follow-up questions or even requesting that the answers you get include actual quotations from the text they’re summarizing.
Chatbots will happily summarize documents for you. (Gizmodo) Rewriting text
As a digital publication, we of course believe that human-written text is far superior to AI-written text—even if it takes a little longer to churn out—but that doesn’t mean AI can’t be helpful for writing. It can be really useful for phrasing something differently, coming up with alternative words, or tweaking the tone of an existing passage of text.
If you want to think about it another way, AI can work as a supercharged thesaurus and dictionary for writers, augmenting rather than replacing the human brain. Again, hallucinations are less of a problem than they’d otherwise be because the AI isn’t inventing anything from scratch (and you’re acting as an editor at the same time).
Transcribing audio
We’ve written before about transcription services that use artificial intelligence to turn spoken audio into digital text quickly. This is another example of how AI can genuinely save you time and effort. You can get long audio clips from lectures, meetings, interviews, and more, all turned into text in the space of just a few minutes.
This feature is also available in apps like the Google Recorder on Pixel phones and is coming to the Voice Memos app in iOS 18. It powers numerous live caption services and can even translate between languages automatically. While it’s not perfect in terms of accuracy, the best ones are pretty close and getting better all the time.
Getting ideas
One of the best ways to negate the problem of AI hallucinations is to use the tech in situations when hallucinations are actually helpful. So think up new ideas for something, whether it’s a product project, a startup, a mobile app, the next twist in your novel, something to keep the kids entertained at home, or whatever it needs to be.
Admittedly, the generated ideas aren’t going to be truly original—merely the smushed-together averages of all the creative ideas the AI has ever been trained on. However, they can still help spark something in your mind or take you in a direction you wouldn’t otherwise have thought of, so they’re adding to your creativity rather than replacing it.
Use AI to aid inspiration. (Gizmodo) Analyzing data
AI algorithms can undoubtedly process masses of data at lightning speed, finding patterns and associations that mere humans might miss. This kind of technology is being used in everything from optimizing traffic flow to interpreting brain scans—in all kinds of situations where huge volumes of data need to be processed.
This isn’t so much an AI use case that you can engage with yourself, but you might well benefit from it in the years ahead—whether that’s through a more accurate medical diagnosis or a more efficient subway timetable. Algorithms aren’t just for keeping you locked to social media; they can also do good in the world.
