Fun and everyday uses for ChatGPT

August 9, 2023 10:33 AM

I'm becoming more familiar with ChatGPT and have so far used it mostly for reviewing/comparing products and finding books similar to ones I enjoyed. My younger coworkers have used it for planning trips, writing resumes and cover letters, and planning meals. I'm so curious - what other ways are people are using this tech? Especially for fun or making everyday life easier rather than work!
posted by switcheroo to Computers & Internet (20 answers total)

I think it's very entertaining having it rewrite dry technical stuff in the style of a well-known author or person*. Werner Herzog, for example.


* Yes, I know it has been trained to do this without most authors' permission
posted by jonathanhughes at 11:02 AM on August 9, 2023

As a parent of a young kid, I've had it write bedtime stories including special details, like featuring our pets.
posted by bizzyb at 11:19 AM on August 9, 2023 [5 favorites]

I asked it to write a rhyming poem about riding bicycles and different kinds of bicycles. It reminded me of the kind of poem I wrote in elementary and middle school. Fun and silly.

I did use it to help me figure out some technical medical terminology. It gave me enough information to do my own google searches for the proper medical term.
posted by bluedaisy at 11:22 AM on August 9, 2023

I used it to create recipes from the list of ingredients I have on-hand. Didn't try any of them, but it was pretty cool that it could do that!
posted by tristeza at 11:48 AM on August 9, 2023

I've used it quite a bit for my D&D game. I've used it to make up riddles where I already know the solution, make up silly songs for an NPC bard to sing, generate room descriptions that I can use for inspiration, etc.
posted by riotnrrd at 11:50 AM on August 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

I use it occasionally for silly rhymes or poems, for example christmas.gifts here are often accompanied by a rhyming hint. I also use it sometimes in the way I used to use google sets (rip) ie to suggest more similar things. Unfortunatly it's dumb AF and I spend as much tme correcting and and fighting with it as anything else. It does keep me out of other internet fights so that's also a good use.
posted by Iteki at 11:51 AM on August 9, 2023

Maybe not a fun use, but definitely an evertyday use - having it proofread emails. Give instructions like copy edit this and make it sound like i'm sincerely sorry the answer is no.
posted by MadMadam at 11:53 AM on August 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

Oh, I've also used it to do basic maths, like work out the angle of a roof and things but I'm not confident in the results.
posted by Iteki at 12:00 PM on August 9, 2023

I find it really useful for cleaning up text; for example:

- pasting poorly-OCR'd text from a PDF and asking it to fix stray line breaks, page numbers, and mistranscriptions
- pasting in Wikipedia text and asking it to remove those numbered citation footnotes
- pasting in subtitles and asking it to adjust the timestamps
- basically any sort of complex find-and-replace operation that would normally require spending 20 minutes re-learning basic regex for the nth time

Ditto asking for Excel formulas.

Recently, I used it to help finish up a draft FPP; I gave it a formatted list of games and asked it to insert brief descriptions in each title tag. I was familiar with all the games and could have done it myself, but was posting from mobile and would have had a bear of a time trying to tap out all that HTML. (It also quickly converted a list of lowercase tags into CamelCase.)

It's also surprisingly great at pounding out short custom userscripts for extensions like Tampermonkey and Stylus. If you want to alter the appearance or behavior of a specific webpage, just describe what you want and the extension you're using and it will craft the relevant code. It will often fail at first, but just describe the problem and after a round or two of troubleshooting it will usually identify and fix any problems. Example: I play a daily puzzle game, Chronophoto, which gives you a final score out of 5,000; I asked for a script to convert this to a percentage.

Haven't tested it extensively, but it appears to be at least on par with Google Translate in terms of translation, with the added ability to provide explanations of idioms and word choices on demand.

On a less technical note: recommendation engine! Describe your favorite films/songs/games and what you like about them and it can serve up spooky-good alternatives.

Things it is NOT good at:

- Plot summaries: It will frequently mix up or hallucinate plot details even for well-known movies and shows
- Math: Despite being a fairly competent programmer, asking questions that involve mathematical reasoning will often get you differing answers between attempts
- Recipes + fitness: seems like it would be useful, but too easily ruined by a stray oversight
- Anything mission-critical where the time needed to generate and review+verify the output would take more time than just doing it by hand
posted by Rhaomi at 12:49 PM on August 9, 2023 [11 favorites]

I've used it to do things like simulate old computer systems. It does a surprisingly decent job of responding in a reasonable-ish way to common commands, even on weird/obscure OSs.

Yes, I know this is incredibly niche.

I also sometimes use it for brainstorming or just talking about fanfiction or the like. It never gets tired of rehashing the same things.
posted by Alensin at 1:58 PM on August 9, 2023

It's great for committing fraud by impersonating authors. The deal is really simple. Find an author that has lots of sales, get ChatGPT to use their text to train on and create a print on demand book plausibly written by them. Use the same name as the author name.

When you put it up on Amazon, their AI will link your books to the original author's profile and make them visible to anyone who searches, and then their customers will buy your books and the money will go to you. Bonus, it's really, really hard for the other author to get rid of you, because Amazon and GoodReads aren't set up to prevent it. If you and your fellow fraudsters do it enough the real author's books will get pushed to the bottom of the search results.

Better yet, it's technically not really fraud. It's legal because you're not claiming to be the Jane Brown who writes Historical Fiction, you're claiming to be another Jane Brown, who also writes Historical Fiction, inspired by the original author. It's not your fault that the search engines can't tell you apart.

This is probably not what you were thinking of, tho.
posted by Jane the Brown at 3:18 PM on August 9, 2023 [11 favorites]

According to my SuperHuman.ai cheat sheet, the generic 3.5 is good for marketing, coding, sales, design, customer service, and research.

it is also very good in reviewing blocks of text, from summarizing a transcript of an youtube episode, to review a resume, from fixing grammar and improve clarity of writing, to ELI5 a subject and/or rhyme and backronym something.
posted by kschang at 6:35 PM on August 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

I've been working on updating my professional website. For fairly generic sections, like the benefits of using the technique that I am trained to use, AI is great, probably because there are enough examples of similar stuff from others using the same common techniques that it gets me very serviceable text and I know enough about the topic to make sure that it is accurate.

However, for most writing, I either use the AI as a starting point (like creating a poem for a memorial service) or when I need to cover specific information in a certain style (like the more personal parts of my website) I will write a bad first draft and ask the AI for the second. It still takes a significant create effort to the end results but it also much easier to get there when I can bounce off of the the AI generated text.
posted by metahawk at 6:38 PM on August 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

Like metahawk, I use Chat GPT as a starting point, and specifically for drafting proposals and reports. I give it detailed instructions on a section-by-section basis. I've definitely had worse interns.
posted by DarlingBri at 2:17 AM on August 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Chat GPT is a great canned friend/advisor. Its conversational tone really helps. Things I have asked recently include:

- Convince me why I shouldn't spend more money on clothes & accessories this month. Be as persuasive as possible.

- I'm feeling panicky right now, what should I do?

- I have to write a report on XYZ, where do I begin? Break it down for me into small steps and use simple language.

I wouldn't rely on it solely, of course, but it's useful for those small moments during the workday when you don't want to bother a real person and don't want to get sucked into doomscrolling.
posted by guessthis at 8:09 AM on August 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

I've used it for meal planning ("Give me a 5-day DASH menu with lunches that are suitable for making ahead"). It did a pretty good job and even generated the grocery list. Though it didn't supply the recipes, the meals were simple enough to improvise. Once, I used it to write a short Python program, but it wrote itself into a corner and it took me a few days to figure out how (I am not much of a programmer). When I finally figured out the bug and pointed it out, its response was, "yes that is a bug."

My wife has used it to generate problem sets for her middle school math students.

On the whole, I found it useful to produce generalized summaries of complicated topics (or things I've forgotten), though it's good to bear in mind that these responses can be confidently incomplete. Another time, I posed the question, "how might a theology degree be useful in a secular job" and it gave a list of secondary skills which would, in fact, be pretty useful in daily work. So maybe more of a food-for-thought sort of utility - a sort of conversational equivalent of Eno's Oblique Strategies?
posted by jquinby at 9:51 AM on August 10, 2023

Better yet, it's technically not really fraud. It's legal because you're not claiming to be the Jane Brown who writes Historical Fiction, you're claiming to be another Jane Brown, who also writes Historical Fiction, inspired by the original author. It's not your fault that the search engines can't tell you apart.

I can't really tell how tongue-in-cheek this is, but the behavior described here is certainly fraudulent.
posted by benbenson at 9:58 PM on August 10, 2023

Another impressive use case: a few years ago, I used a guide I found online to create a custom RSS feed proxy using Amazon AWS and its API Gateway feature, in order to bypass some annoying rate-limiting that was being done to the feed. I barely understood what I was doing at the time, and when the feed started erroring out recently enough time had passed that I was completely stumped by the byzantine API Gateway interface (and of course could no longer track down the guide I'd used). So I went to ChatGPT and described the situation in as much detail as I could, including a textual version of this imposing flowchart of jargon. Although I did have a suspicion about what might be going on, and reported my hunch to it, I was extremely impressed that it not only understood and explained the situation, but even gave detailed and accurate instructions on exactly what buttons to click and what information to enter and where in order to fix the problem. It seemed like a prime opportunity to hallucinate UI details that didn't exist, but it turned out to be just like talking to a domain expert. I suppose the extensive documentation on AWS online (and thus in its training data) helped, but still, if your problem relates to something well-understood, it can ELI5 and walk you through it with relative ease.
posted by Rhaomi at 10:15 PM on August 11, 2023

I recall reading somewhere, which I can't find right now, that ChatGPT's technical expertise comes from crawling Q&A at Stackoverflow. That would probably explain why it knows how to solve a lot of pretty esoteric technical problems.
posted by kschang at 10:32 PM on August 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

It helped me craft a lovely updated artist bio! I prompted it to ask me questions about my work and built a bio from there, with some word choices that I would have not necessarily thought to use but fit pretty well.
posted by creatrixtiara at 3:03 AM on August 13, 2023