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It would be difficult to imagine the last couple of years without artificial intelligence, even if you don’t use it. Can you recall the last day without some AI-related news item or social-media post — or indeed, a time when the hype didn’t slide into utopian or apocalyptic terms? “If I look five or ten years down the road, it seems like we will be in a world in which the use of AI tools will not just be normal,” writes Justin Weinberg at Daily Nous, offering a more sober take. “Facility with them will be expected, and that expectation will inform the social and professional norms we’ll all be subject to, whether we like it or not.”

To his audience of philosophy academics, Weinberg poses a question: are you using AI? And furthermore, “Is there a particular kind of task you think you’d like to learn how to use AI for, but don’t know how?” Here at Open Culture, we’d like to ask something similar of our readers. If you use AI in your daily life in meaningful ways, what do you use it for? We’ve previously featured applications like OpenAI’s text-generating ChatGPT and image-generating DALL‑E, both of which have astonished users with the rapidity of their evolution. Now, tools promising “the power of AI” proliferate daily across ever more diverse fields of human endeavor.

For many of us, AI has thus far amounted to little more than a technology with which to amuse ourselves, albeit a very impressive one. I myself have laughed as hard at AI-generated stories as I have at anything else over the past year or two, though much depends on the thought I put into the prompts. But I’ve also heard the occasional story of genuine benefit that an AI tool has brought to someone’s personal or professional life, whether by clearly explaining a long-misunderstood concept, filling the gaps in a child’s education, or helping to determine what kind of care to seek for a medical problem.

If you have any such experiences yourself, please do leave a co*ment on this post telling us about them — and don’t forget to mention what variety of AI you’re using. Open Culture readers may well be getting real mileage out of AI “for summarizing co*plex academic texts, translating historical documents, or exploring philosophy, literature, and science more deeply”; for generating “poetry, music co*position, or visual art in the vein of historical and avant-garde styles”; or for “practice with foreign languages, whether through translation, conversation, or grammar correction.” At least, that’s what ChatGPT thinks. Look forward to reading your thoughts in the co*ments below.

Related content:

Google Launches a New Course Called “AI Essentials”: Learn How to Use Generative AI Tools to Increase Your Productivity

Sci-Fi Writer Arthur C. Clarke Predicted the Rise of Artificial Intelligence & the Existential Questions We Would Need to Answer (1978)

Google & MIT Offer a Free Course on Generative AI for Teachers and Educators

Unlock AI’s Potential in Your Work and Daily Life: Take a Popular Course from Google

Noam Chomsky on ChatGPT: It’s “Basically High-Tech Plagiarism” and “a Way of Avoiding Learning”

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.