Forget ChatGPT as a modern-day scribe. I don’t care to read its poetry, and I don’t want to read articles written by it. It digests poorly written, human-made content into a homogenized slurry of poorly written, machine-made content.
What took me a while to appreciate was that ChatGPT (and other generative AIs) have much more practical uses, too.
practical uses
I call out ChatGPT by name because it’s the Uber or Netflix of generative AI. Its name recognition is such that people use it as shorthand for AI. But you could use any generative AI. Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, and even Perplexity.
And while Perplexity AI is optimized more for search than being a chatbot, you could give it a whirl with these uses, too. I’ve tried it with Perplexity Pro, and it’s performed quite well.
These are three uses I’ve found most useful for the various AIs I’ve used over the past year.
Troubleshooting
Even if you’re the type to keep the user manual of every ice cream maker, smartwatch, or dehumidifier you buy, they can be opaque, even downright unhelpful. Sometimes useful or crucial tips aren’t found in the manufacturer’s literature at all, but rather on a Reddit thread or the company’s official support forum.
Running your problem (and the affected device) past ChatGPT and asking it for help in diagnosing and fixing the problem has saved me countless hours in figuring out home surround sound system troubles and printer problems.
And if you need pictures or an instructional video, just ask it for some in a follow-up question. It’ll point you toward a YouTube, if it exists. That’s what helped me when it came time for me to remove a severely pot-bound houseplant from its too-small pot.
item identification
I had a problem. There was a bicycle that I’d parked in my garage, and I needed to know its specific model name. The brand made a ton of versions that all looked alike, only very slightly different from one another. But I’d forgotten the name of it, and it wasn’t written anywhere on the bike itself.
Then a lightbulb went off. In my phone’s ChatGPT app, I snapped a picture of the bike and asked ChatGPT to identify the particular model. Boom. This was with ChatGPT-4. Now that ChatGPT-5 is out, I’d expect it to work even better.
After that, I used the same trick to identify problems with houseplants (leaf blight, it turned out) and strange bugs that appeared on the carpet (carpet beetles, it turned out).
discounts and coupons
Nothing done online is as tedious as looking for discount codes and coupons. Yes, I know all about Honey, a browser extension that searches for them for you. But sometimes it doesn’t catch them all.
Like you’ve encountered, I’m sure, I too have waded through all the sites that promise huge coupons that are either outdated or never worked in the first place. Asking ChatGPT to find coupons and discount codes, while omitting ones that have expired, has saved my sanity (and a lot of my time) on numerous occasions.
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