A Few AI Use Cases

I'm a heavy user of AI (read: ChatGPT) and I thought it might be interesting to lay out a couple of recent use cases. I'm at the Mobile airport right now with a 3 hour delay thanks to Global Warming Climate Change a normal January cold snap, so I figured I might as well do something productive with my time.

Landscape Design

I found a good property on this trip. It's on the river proper with a great view, has half an acre of flat land, the house is well-constructed, laid out nicely and raised well off the ground and out of flood risk, the dock's piers are solid. Like most houses along the river, it's been an heirloom property. This one has been in its current family since 1970. For the last decade or so, it's been a party house. No one has lived there full time, it's just been used for weekend getaways and entertaining.

As a result, the thing is in desperate need of maintenance and a face lift. All of the outbuildings including the pier need to be torn out and rebuilt. There are tree stumps leftover from hurricanes that need to be removed. And so on and so forth. I showed a picture of the place to AI and asked for a ruthless analysis of its curb appeal. Here's what I got.

This house has zero emotional pull. It doesn’t say welcome, river life, or Southern charm. It says “county permit approved” and then stops trying. Right now it feels more like an elevated FEMA prototype than a place anyone would want to arrive at.

I think AI hit the mark on this one.

We worked together for a bit on the landscape design and ended up with this.

Same place, new paint, an entry stairway and some raised beds. The shack on the right gets torn down and removed.

That's got a completely different feel. I like it a lot. More to the point, I understand the ideas behind it. I learned from the project and saw how a few simple architectural elements pull you in and also ground the property rather than allowing it to float in the air on its pilings.

AI also recommended that I disperse my cayenne and tobacco throughout the raised beds as accent plants. I hadn't thought of that. I was going to plant them in regimented rows, but now I see that I can get just as many if I disperse them throughout the property and I won't end up with the farmer's look.

Travel Diet

This was a short, solo trip, so while I stayed at a VRBO place and cooked my own food, this time I didn't buy fruits and vegetables. It was just too much hassle and typically they come in too great a quantity. Not much common sense there, I know.

With a bit of idle time on my hands, I pulled out my phone and had a chat with AI about it. A few hours later, I had bought singles of apples, bananas, a single stalk of broccoli, a small container of blueberries and a small container of cherry tomatoes. When I combined this with the cheese, fish, steak and rice I already had, AI informed me that the only thing missing was nuts, preferably almonds or pecans.

I usually do buy some fruits and veggies, but I'd always guessed about the right combinations to give a broad spectrum of nutrients. I felt good after the chat with AI and the shopping, both physically and intellectually.

Technology On Travel

Finally, there are the IT topics. I'm quite capable of doing these things on my own, but they aren't second nature to me any more, so it helped to have AI around to give me advice. I brought along my own WiFi router, a Raspberry PI and a SONOS Roam. I hooked the router into the house's router and I had preset it to my home router's ID and password. It got itself on the Internet through the house router and my phone, SONOS and laptop all thought they were at home and required no setup at all. The Pi needed a little coaxing and that's where AI came in handy. Rather than looking up the Linux commands myself, I just cut pasted AI's suggestions into my Telnet prompt and voila! success.

I haven't tried this yet, but it dawned on me that I could download the manual from my drone, feed it into AI and then use that particular chat session to ask it individual questions like how to download the videos and images quickly and easily. Yes, I could read the manual, but really, who does that sort of thing any more?

Anywho, that's just a smattering of what I'm doing with it these days in addition to writing comic romance adventure fiction. Just wanted to share.