ChatGPT is for the boring stuff
Creating examples, finding blog post images, filling out forms, proofreading, tracking calories, and drafting emails.
Generative AI is great at doing tedious work. It doesn’t always do a fantastic job, but it does things fast, and for most boring work, ‘good enough’ is all you need.
Mollick wrote about using AI for boring work and provided a few examples.
Creating Examples - He needed to mock up a bunch of fake data for a class he was teaching. The example was only going to be used once, and it didn’t need to be particularly interesting.
Finding Images - Another boring job he used it for was creating images for blog posts and presentations. He finds an image he likes online (or sketches one out quickly) and then uses AI to modify it in the way he needs, saving himself a bunch of time.
Filling out Forms - Copy a form into ChatGPT, give it the context it needs, and it will fill everything out for you. Check it and then copy and paste the responses back into the actual form.
I’ve linked to Mollick’s article at the end of this post so you can go through how he does each of these tasks in more detail.
Having a look at my own ChatGPT history, the most repetitive things I seem to use it for are:
Proofreading - The editing doesn’t need to be good, I just need to catch obvious spelling mistakes and silly grammatical errors.
Tracking calories - When I cook a batch of food, I’ll give ChatGPT my ingredients and it gives me back total calories and protein content for the whole batch (and how many portions I need to divide everything into). The figures here don’t need to be exact, they just need to be roughly accurate.
Drafting emails - I’ll copy a conversation thread into ChatGPT and give it the gist of what I want to say so it can articulate everything for me.
The common theme here is tedious, repetitive work that doesn't require deep focus. AI excels at this stuff today.
The truth is, AI just isn’t good enough to automate anyone’s job yet. It can help you program, but it can't write a piece of software. It can help people write, but it won't write an essay worth reading on it’s own. For better or worse, AI is terrible at doing the most important parts of your job. But that’s the wrong way to think about using it. AI is for the boring stuff; it can handle the mundane so we have more space for the bits that actually matter.