Some AI use cases

I had a good conversation with Russell Hunter, one of my coworkers at Automattic. He mentioned some uses of AI like ChatGPT that I hadn’t considered:

Using AI to “read” your writing and respond with Devil’s Advocate-type responses so you can make your argument stronger.

Apparently there is a Roam Research plugin that does this! I hope someone creates one for Obsidian, my note app of choice.

Using AI to help you with mundane things like formatting citations and footnotes.

I suppose you could ask AI to go find you sources for a given statement, but I have ethical concerns about doing that. That would be confirmation bias or Texas Sharpshooter fallacy on steroids.

Summarizing your work. I write a weekly post at work every Monday. What if I fed ChatGPT all of my meetings, meeting notes, emails, Slack threads, GitHub commits, and P2 posts, and asked it to summarize what I worked on that week?

That got me thinking a bit more afterward as well:

OpenAI has Whisper, the video transcription engine. What if we feed a meeting video to Whisper, then pipe the output to ChatGPT and ask it to write meeting notes with actions items? If it works well, everyone can be present in the meeting instead of taking notes.

In general, I think people focusing on how “dull” or “mediocre” the ChatGPT writing is misses the point. The most important use-cases for AI are to help us be happier, more productive, and more effective by teaching us where we can improve, helping us get there, and taking care of all the boring stuff we don’t like doing so we can focusing on the things that bring us joy and fulfillment.