Tech expert’s top 5 uses for AI

Tech Expert Trevor Long has revealed the top five ways you can use AI to enrich your life from the workplace to the living room.

As the AI revolution dawns, a leading tech expert has revealed the top five ways you can use the technology to enrich your life from the workplace to the living room.

Editor of EFTM and self-confessed tech junkie Trevor Long has highlighted five key ways that the average Australian can use “chat-style” artificial intelligence to help out with common tasks.

Sitting down with news.com.au, Mr Long said there are plenty of ways to “muck around” with AI.

“It’s pretty amazing … just think of it like another member of your family or another member of your work team,” he said.

The three main AI chatbots Mr Long believes are the easiest to use are Microsoft Co-Pilot, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Gemini.

Most new personal devices like phones and laptops come supplied with at least one of these chatbots, all of which have both free and premium features.

Here’s how you can use them to change your life:

Emails

Everybody hates sending them, everybody hates receiving them, but Mr Long has rightly pointed out that emails are a fact of life.

“Think firstly about work … drafting emails, proofreading emails, rewriting things. So you’ve written a long email. It might be to a client or a colleague or your boss and you’ve gone ‘Oh, I don’t know. Should I send it?’ Highlight the text, put it into an AI … It’ll do it for you,” he said.

Here is an example of an email that needs to be reworked.

With the help of ChatGPT, the tone of the email is softened and the sender comes across far more politely.

Summaries

For a lot of people working in corporate environments, information needs to be consumed in both large amounts and with tremendous speed and efficiency.

“Sometimes you get sent a government pdf – it’s a ten page document about something they’ve launched. Run it through AI and say, ‘can you give me the top five things about this I should understand,” said Mr Long.

“What I do is I say ‘tell me where to look in the document, tell me what I want to look at,’ so I might look at a 200 page government document and say, ‘can you point me to the five submissions that are most critical of this government policy?’

Here is an example of ChatGPT taking a large report and condensing it down to some easily understandable dot points.

Education

For readers with kids or backgrounds that rely heavily on scientific and mathematical knowledge, this one is for you.

“My 13-year-old was frustrated at his desk the other day doing a maths task … so I took out my ChatGPT app, and here’s what it did. I took a photo of what looked like a very complex formula and question, because I have no idea what this is, and I said buddy, we’re going to ask ChatGPT,” said Mr Long.

“The critical thing here is that ChatGPT didn’t say ‘here’s the answer,’ ChatGPT worked through it and said ‘here’s what I did,’ “ he said.

“I was firstly able to have a really important moment with my son, to have this conversation about this maths task and help him out a little bit, and I think he learned from it just as much as I did. So I think learning and education is a brilliant use for AI.”

Here is a question from the 2022 maths Standard HSC paper, and ChatGPT’s response to being asked to solve the question with working out.

Travel planning

Millions of Aussies take to the skies and the seas every year to go and explore the big wide world, and Mr Long believes that AI can help with your overseas travel too.

“I’m taking my family to America later in the year,” said Mr Long.

“I could say to ChatGPT ‘hey, I’m going to take my family to Houston for two days, what should we see?’ And then it might list 10 things. But then I can say, ‘actually my kids are 12, 13 and 18 so can you make it more age appropriate?’ It’ll mould that,” he said.

Here is a prompt and response from ChatGPT for somebody from Australia planning to travel to the United States.

Fun things

In between life’s more serious moments, Mr Long believes that AI Chatbots can help out with some of the more lighthearted points in people’s lives.

“You might be doing a wedding speech, get it to help you. If you need jokes on a particular topic, get it to help you,” he said.

“If you and your kids have got a fun little character in your lives, get it to write a bedtime story for you. Get it to write a fun poem for the family, use it for fun, because it can have an emotion in that sense.”

Here’s an example of a prompt and response for somebody putting together a best man speech for a wedding.

While artificial intelligence is able to display remarkably human-esque responses to many prompts and questions, experts say it is still important to remain cautious.

The Australian Department of Industry, Science and Resources believes “as AI becomes more pervasive, it can also present risks, scaling up errors and biases in ways that cause real harm to people”.

“It’s important to remember that human and artificial intelligence are different things,” said a spokesman for the CSIRO.

“For example, humans can instinctively understand context and apply common sense. AI systems approach things differently,” they said.

“In the right hands, AI systems can be incredibly powerful tools … but it’s up to all of us to ensure it’s being pointed at the brightest future possible.”

Originally published as Tech expert’s top 5 uses for AI