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> Maybe I can finally learn what I'm suppose to be using generative AI for to be more productive. So many things. It's a general-purpose "thing doer" in many s
by edanm 2y ago
> Maybe I can finally learn what I'm suppose to be using generative AI for to be more productive.
So many things. It's a general-purpose "thing doer" in many situations where you otherwise wouldn't have one. Let me give a super-simple example - not a high-value one, but an example of obvious value IMO.
Say for some reason, you have a screenshot of a bunch of text. Maybe you took a picture of a page from a book or something, idk. Now you want it in textual form. You can throw it in ChatGPT and ask it to give you the text, and a few seconds later you have the text.
I'm not saying there are no other solutions for this - there are. You can look for some software to do OCR or something. But that's what makes ChatGPT or others general-purpose - they're a one-stop shop for a lot of different things, including small one-off tasks like this. I can name a dozen other one-off tasks that it helps me with. Again, not the most high-value things it helps me with (that'd be programming help), but an undeniable example of value, IMO.
How would you do this without an LLM? (I personally would've just typed it up myself, probably.)
- hx8 2y ago> How would you do this without an LLM? (I personally would've just typed it up myself, probably.) This has been a feature of Apple Preview (default image program) for years and years. You can just highlight text and copy it from a jpeg or png.
- edanm 2y agoOK, first of all, really cool. I don't think I knew this! Thank you. But how about a next step that I use LLMs for - taking this text from a document and reformatting it as, say, bullet points. E.g. I literally had this in a Jupyter notebook: [some_var_name, some_other_name, ...] and a bunch of those, and I wanted them redone as bullet points. It was a bit more complicated than that but I'm simplifying for the example. I literally took a screenshot, through it in ChatGPT and got back the correctly-formatted list. There are other ways to solve something like this of course (normally I'd put it in VSCode and use multiple cursors or macros), but I don't think there's anything that can go from a screenshot and a one-sentence description, to having finished the task, all in a single tool (that can also solve 100 other problems that come up in my work similarly easily).
- hx8 2y agoI've been writing macros for that sort of thing for 20 years. I started off writing them in Notepad++, but write the in Emacs now. If we're talking about tools that solve 100 problems easily, I think I'm going to stick to Emacs.
- Kye 2y agoIt mostly just uses those other solutions in the background. You can open the Analyzing and see it building a script with OpenCV for vision tasks. It's a handy front-end.