100 authentic use cases for AI

How are you using AI? A team pored over 10,000 authentic online comments and distilled them to these 100 use cases.

I recently chanced upon this research about generative AI use. Though published 6 months ago, I felt it remained highly relevant.

How others are using AI

In summary, they went through tens of thousands of comments on Reddit and Quora, discarding the detritus and noting down the gems.

Here are the main categories that the top 100 use cases were classified into:

a. Content creation & Editing (22%).
b. Technical assistance & Troubleshooting (23%).
c. Personal & Professional support (17%).
d. Learning & Education (15%).
e. Hobbies & Recreation (13%).
f. Research, analysis, and decision-making (10%).

To my surprise, I have made use of AI across multiple categories.

How I use AI

Here are some uses I dug out from my ChatGPT history.

• For finding that word at the tip of your tongue: "Give me 10 options for 'mental preparation'."
• Write that perfect subtitle: "Give me 10 options to denote 'travel danger'. Make it two words only."
• Verify the meaning of a phrase: "What does this mean: Can you handle the truth if it hits you in the face?"
• Get the right description: "Describe a pager in bullet point form. Not more than 8 words for each bullet point."
• Find a term for a technical process: "What do you call the low temperature at which a two-phase coolant evaporates?"

There's a lot more and I use other tools as well. But you get the idea.

Two articles, two outcomes

Of course, not all my experimentation ended well. There was this interview where I successfully used the interrogation technique to draw out salient points to write up an article faster.

I estimated I saved 1.5 hours.

Another day, another interview. Using the same technique, I was halfway through it when it just felt "off" to me. When I checked line by line, I found multiple, subtle hallucinations.

I probably took 2 additional hours to make it right.

These days, I'm much more careful. But I think this exemplifies the very real weaknesses of AI and how even a simple "writing" use case can yield wildly differing outcomes across scenarios.

What about you?

How are you using AI?

Do share your successful and not-so-successful anecdotes here!