As usual, it’s time for my quarterly article and I have nothing in mind to write about. So, deadline looming, I sit at my desk with a sluggish brain and try to run through article ideas. Staring out my window, I think I could write about trees, elk, blue skies, traffic. None of these really intrigue me enough to squeeze out a whole article on, so I turned to my new best friend: Claude.ai. I ask Claude (which is a conversational AI tool similar to ChatGPT) for article ideas. Claude spits out a list of 10 article ideas—and the coolest part is that they pertain to me, my life, where I live, what I do for work. Because I’ve been using Claude regularly, it now knows me. Creepy? Maybe so. Helpful? Most definitely. AI is quietly revolutionizing our daily lives.
“AI tools are reshaping every profession, passion, and pastime in ways both subtle and profound.”
“2001: A Space Odyssey” planted a genuine fear of technology deep in my soul. HAL’s psychotic human-like behavior terrified me and set the precedent for me to view all AI as frightening. Combine that with my position as a self-confessed “lagger” on the technology adoption curve, and it’s no wonder I’ve come to appreciate AI’s helpfulness later than many of my peers. Yet, here I am now, genuinely appreciating several AI tools. If you’re a fellow “lagger” like me, or if you’ve started experimenting with AI and are ready to discover more ways it can be helpful, here are some of my favorite AI applications.
Writing assistance. I love writing my Serenity articles and I feel like I do a decent job at conveying my ideas in writing. And yet emails are a whole different story. In email, I’m a “get-to-the-point” kind of girl. My emails tend to be very dry and brief. And so, Claude.ai helps me improve the tone of my emails and get my point across. I simply ask Claude to rewrite my initial terse email in a warmer tone and voila! As a Realtor, writing descriptions of homes in listings is something that, again, can tend to be a little dry. But with the help of Claude or Chat GPT or any other Large Language Models (LLMs), I write poetic descriptions of homes that nobody will be able to resist.
Meal planning and recipes. Yes, meal planning! Try this: peek into your refrigerator and enter what you see into apps like Supercook, Plant Jammer, or Whisk. Then prompt the app to find a recipe incorporating those ingredients. Out pops an actual recipe for your dinner. Or, you can ask your app to create a week’s worth of dinner menus for you based on a high protein, low carb diet. Many meal planning apps will then create a grocery list for you to shop to make those recipes. Mind blown. And my favorite AI trick in the kitchen is to ask Siri to read me the recipe. I no longer have to stop what I’m doing to tap my phone screen to refresh the recipe. Now I just ask Siri to read the next step and then when I’m ready, I ask for the next step, etc.
Photos. Have you ever made someone wait while you scrolled and scrolled and scrolled through your photos to find that one picture of your dog? Yep, me too. Now AI in our smartphones has the capability to search for photos. I enter “dog” into the search bar and every photo that has a dog in it will pull up on my phone. Pretty fancy. The technology with photo recognition enables me to search for photos of a beach to bring up my family vacation photos. One of my favorite new tricks is to use my camera to take a photo of a plant and then ask AI to help me identify the plant. When someone asks me, “What is this plant?”, my standard answer is “Rocky Mountain *insert color* *insert shape or location* plant.” Now I have a new answer that is factual rather than cheeky.
Research assistance. I am a frequent searcher on the internet. I have fond memories of the days when we didn’t have access to all of the answers. We wondered about many things and maybe over the course of our lives answers to questions would reveal themselves. And maybe they would not. Now all we have to do is ask Siri to answer a question for us. Or, pull up our web browser and use the search feature to find the answer to our queries. Artificial intelligence has really beefed up search results. For instance, I type “When is the best time to buy airline tickets?” and I get an extensive summary based on answers all across the internet. It saves a ton of time. And if I am reading something technical or complicated, I simply link the article to Claude and out comes a summary of the article. I can enter the results of a personality test and ask AI to tell me how best to communicate with that person and what their learning style might be. The opportunities really are endless and I look forward to imagining new questions that will help me do my job or learn about something new.
Organization. I am a coach for real estate agents. One of my favorite tricks is to prompt Claude to write a story about someone based on their annual goals. I get a detailed story about their year. Next I ask Claude to make a daily to-do list based on those goals. Now I have been able to chunk down what it takes for someone to reach their annual goals into daily bite-sized steps. Genius. Additionally, there are productivity apps that will organize that to-do list in order to optimize time spent. It will group tasks together and create a schedule based on the specific requirements that I set forth.
The ideas shared here merely glimpse the transformative potential of artificial intelligence in our daily lives. Whether you’re a doctor, artist, teacher, or gardener—AI tools are reshaping every profession, passion, and pastime in ways both subtle and profound. I’m continuously amazed by these evolving possibilities and eager to explore more! Have you discovered an AI application that’s changed your workflow or sparked your creativity? I’d love to hear about your personal AI breakthroughs. Drop me a line at [email protected] and share your favorite AI innovations.
