What does the quotidian use Gen AI’s look like? When Gen AI becomes used for the mundane (help me find a recipe)? And what drives it?
Gen AI's daily use spans a spectrum for people, ranging from never using it to relying on it for almost everything. I'm at the latter end of the spectrum. In my house, Gen AI is utilized for expected tasks like summarization, assistance with coding projects, cooking, and planning summer camps for my kids. I use it to search the web when doing research (GPT-4 or Copilot) and to help edit when writing. These personal experiences reflect broader truths about Gen AI’s capabilities.
Gen AI is beneficial in two main areas: providing additional cognitive resources and expert knowledge.
Gen AI possesses more knowledge about everything than I do. It simplifies the process of getting up to speed on a topic, but its real value lies in managing attention. I have a finite amount of cognitive resources, distributed throughout the day across a variety of tasks. Gen AI essentially augments my cognitive capacity.
Consider the process of conducting research. The normal routine involves:
Remembering what is being researched
Understanding why that topic is important
Identifying key resources
Reading and taking notes on crucial pieces of information
Writing them out
With Gen AI, the entire process is streamlined: you define what you want to know and how you intend to use that knowledge. This information is encapsulated into a prompt, which contains the essential set of requirements, and then AI retrieves the relevant information and summarizes it based on the desired use case.
Picking up a coding project becomes much easier when AI understands the context of the entire development project (Cursor IDE), and error messages can be directly inputted.
As AI continues to evolve, how I use it keeps expanding, pointing to a future where AI is a silent copilot in my life. I could perform everything Gen AI does for me on my own, but it would take more time and require greater attention.