Generative AI tools are increasingly becoming part of our daily lives, enhancing productivity by automating repetitive tasks and assisting with problem-solving. As someone who is switching between work responsibilities, personal life, and academic projects, I wanted to talk about how AI, mostly ChatGPT, became a central part of my life.
I started using ChatGPT in January 2023 and immediately got the paid version. I mostly used it for university. This was a whole new world. I no longer needed to search for things anymore. I could ask it anything and get very good answers. This helped me significantly get my schoolwork done more efficiently. It is also really good in explaining hard subjects in a way that I can understand it well. I did not needed to ask fellow students or the professor anymore, I had my personal trainer.
Around this time, I also began using it more for personal purposes, primarily to generate ideas. It would generate a lot of information and then I would select what I wanted. Gradually, I started using Google less, turning to ChatGPT for most of my questions. This was because it often provided more personalised and accurate answers. It understood the questions I was asking. Occasionally, I also used it for text-to-image generation, but the images it produced still looked quite fake and didn’t really capture what I meant. That’s why I stopped using it. However, recently, I tried out Midjourney, and it generates high-quality images that make it increasingly difficult to tell if they are real or fake. This got my attention and now I am generating more and more images.
At work, if I had a question about the tools I worked with, I could actually ask this to ChatGPT and get a clear explanation. I did not have to search the internet anymore, which saved a lot of time. I cannot use it for content, because of the restrictions from the company I work at.
However, I noticed that the AI wasn’t perfect. There were times when the outputs were not correct, especially when the task required a deeper understanding of the context. In one instance, when I asked the AI to generate a report based on a specific set of data, the output was wrong. I tried multiple times, and it just could not understand what I wanted. This highlighted a major gap: while AI can perform tasks quickly, it still lacks the critical thinking that comes from experience and human insight. However I have being trying out o1-preview version from ChatGTP and I can really see that it improved that critical thinking if I think about 1 year ago. This shows the rapid improvements AI is going through.
For coding, ChatGTP has a deep understanding and can really translate well what you want. I experimented with AI-generated code, I asked the AI to create a simple script to download music from YouTube. While it provided a solid foundation, I still needed to tweak it and ask the same question in different ways to get the code to align with my exact requirements. The potential here is really big, but for now, AI still relies on human oversight.
Looking forward, I think the real value of AI lies in improving its understanding of context. If generative AI could evolve to understand more subtle nuances, it would become a far more reliable problem-solving tool. Additionally, making AIs that have an understanding of everything would also increase the use case and ease of use a lot. Right now, there are too many different AIs that are good at one thing.
In the end, while I think AI is far from replacing human expertise, it already has and certainly will have a really big impact on personal life, work, and school.
