Survey: Do You Use AI Chat?

Has Chattie found a place in your life?

I love AI!

ChatGPT was such a breathtakingly amazing breakthrough that seemed to come out of nowhere, just a bit over a year ago. And shortly before that, the AI image generators arrived: DALL-E, MidJourney, Stable Diffusion, and so on.

I want to talk about how I am using these AIs in my daily life and work, and ask whether you are using them too.

Google search is pretty much completely gone from my life … I just ask Chattie instead.

I was skeptical when ChatGPT burst upon the scene. It was fascinating that the natural language input/output challenge had finally and definitively been solved. (I remember when genius Ted Hoff, the very first Intel Fellow and one of the inventors of the microprocessor, began working on it in 1978.)

But the hallucination problem put me off. What good was it, if I couldn’t trust the answers? However, GPT 4 soon appeared and the hallucinations were eliminated, at least as far as I could see in my usage.

Since then, Google search has been pretty much completely gone from my life. I just ask Bing Chat (bing.com/new) instead. I call her “Chattie”.

I just asked Chattie about the phrase “at my beck and call” to makes sure I am using it correctly.

I always get a good answer—I rarely even need to refine my question. And if I do need to refine it, or dig deeper, or go off on a tangent, Chattie uses the context of what I asked before so I don’t need to repeat myself. Chattie also provides links to where it found the information so I can verify the content or dig deeper if I like.

Chattie is like a really smart person with an incredible breadth of knowledge, at my beck and call. (I just asked her about the phrase “at my beck and call” to makes sure I am using it correctly.) Sometimes, now, a random question enters my head when I am not at a computer or my phone, and I find myself wishing I had a Chattie implant in my brain. Not too far off, I imagine.

Chattie is like having a very smart and experienced coder pair-programming with me.

In my work, I am a software coder developing full stack web applications in Javascript. I ask Chattie coding questions all day long.

I used to use Google search, which usually brought me to Stack Overflow. Or I would go to the documentation for the tool or library I am using, such as Chrome devtools or jQuery. But no more.

Chattie is incredibly great at answering technical questions and even writing code snippets for me. She is like having a very smart and experienced coder pair-programming with me.

Do you have a “Chattie” in your life?

Finally, I occasionally ask Chattie for illustrations such as the one atop this article. Chattie uses DALL-E to generate them. Sometimes it is difficult to get exactly what I want, but this one was dead easy.

So that’s me and my AI. How about you? Do you have a “Chattie” in your life?