DENVER — You may not know it, but artificial intelligence is already part of your daily life. It helps you avoid an accident while driving or finds the nearest gas station. It’s behind voice assistants like Alexa and Siri and it’s all over social media sites filtering for ads and content that are tailored to the individual user.
But for those who are not super tech savvy, AI can be intimidating, so here are some simple ways to incorporate it in your daily life.
“I think it's useful to at least try to get out of the comfortable zone a little bit and try to play with it,” said Chenhao Tan, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago.
Help with simple tasks
The first way you can dabble in AI: helping with repetitive, simple tasks. Scheduling assistants, for example, can be used to book regular meetings in your calendar.
It can also help with checking your grammar, polishing up your resume and organizing notes.
“Microsoft has recently released some programs that will make a meeting with a to do list, right? And so, it will have a summary of a particular meeting which is awesome, and it will then have also a to do list from that particular meeting,” said Steve Beaty, a professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver.
But Tan warns to not overly rely on the technology for help.
“There's no guarantee that AI will always improve your resume and AI will likely make it more formulaic and that can be useful for some kind of certain jobs, but that can actually hurt your chances in some other jobs,” he said.
Try new apps featuring AI
Another way to add AI to your life: trying out some apps that rely on the technology.
Some apps can help you manage your finances more effectively, others can scan your plant and tell you what's wrong with it and how to get it healthy again and some even redesign your home.
“What of course the machine is doing is taking the expert advice from tens, hundreds, thousands of people and rolling it all up into the advice for a particular plant,” Beaty said.
That can save you money to not have to hire someone to help but it will inevitably also mean less personalization. AI simply lacks the human touch than a real-life expert can offer.
“If you really care about this thing and you would like to get more in-depth interaction, AI may not be able to provide that right now,” Tan said.
So, consumers might want to use AI in certain instances where a less personalized touch works and then hire someone on the things you really care about.
Try out an AI website
If you haven't tried a site like ChatGPT yet, it's not a bad idea to click around. It can plan a trip for you, come up with a workout plan for you, help with dinner ideas or summarize articles.
Be warned, though that with all new technology comes with a warning.
“When you integrate with one of these or you interact with one of these A is artificial intelligence machine learning systems, you are essentially typically explicitly giving up your data. And so that is a big deal,” Beaty said.
As long as you're careful about your own privacy, Tan says it’s a good idea to at least interact with AI a little bit more.
The bottom line is AI is here to stay, so the more we can understand it and find ways to incorporate it in our lives the more ahead of the game you'll be.
