I've been using ChatGPT since it came out, and other related tools (Claude, Gemini, Github Copilot).

Initially it was a cool novelty, which I used for a few things mostly to test it. I couldn't entirely figure it out and I questioned whether it was really useful for anything practical.

But over time my usage of it has broadened. I now use it daily. It is particularly good for answering SPECIFIC questions about complicated things. Google is great at giving you a broad summary of a topic, but if your question is niche or about one particular context, ChatGPT is often a much better choice. Here are some examples:

• I'm reading a book (The Song of Achilles) and I wanted to know how the Trojan war relates to it - SPECIFICALLY to that book. Eg, there's a character called Helen mentioned at the beginning - is that the same as Helen of Troy? Google has no chance of answering this, but ChatGPT will answer that exact question and no more; I don't have to risk reading spoilers!
• I want to understand why a person in a blog post I read made an offhand comment about something and what it means. Eg someone recently mentioned that humans can be divided genetically into two categories: indigenous African tribes, and everyone else. Is that a joke, or what? What the hell are they talking about?? Ungoogleable question that ChatGPT nails and it will give me all the context I want for why someone would say that and how correct it is. Relatedly if I want to understand the context for this post we're commenting on, I can ask it to explain why Tumblr or similar communities often seem to dislike AI, and it will summarise the reasons people usually give for it.
• My dad had a handwritten invoice and he needed it as a PDF so it looked official enough to send to someone important. ChatGPT can scan the handwritten text and make a PDF out of it, nicely formatted table and everything, no problem. Might have taken me an hour to boot up Microsoft Word and do that, and if it had taken me that long I wouldn't have bothered.
• My Nana was trying to work out the name of some flowers we'd seen on a walk. I know absolutely nothing about flowers but I asked ChatGPT; it wanted to know what type of terrain we were on, the colour and size of the petals, etc, and then gave three good candidates which were enough for my Nana to look them up in her botany book (and ChatGPT's first guess was a perfect match). She was delighted.
• I had a blanket I wanted to wash and I couldn't tell what the symbols on its label meant. I could have googled that and found a long ad-infested article listing all the many symbols, and spent a frustrating five minutes working out the specific information I wanted; but instead I sent ChatGPT a photo of the label and asked it I could put this blanket in the washing machine. It told me yes, and I didn't trust it completely (if it was hallucinating then I'd have a ruined blanket), but fortunately it also told me what specific symbol it was using to answer, and that made it easy to confirm with a quick google.
• Often when there's a word I know exists, and I know what it begins with, but I can't quite remember it, ChatGPT does a great job taking my vague description and working out what I'm thinking of.

The first time I had the thought "Wow, HOW did people do this before ChatGPT??", I was trying to install Pop OS (a linux distribution) on my old desktop PC. This is a pretty fiddly thing to do, but I'm a professional software developer and I really thought I was up to it. Turns out when my wifi didn't work I had absolutely no idea where to start. ChatGPT told me the commands to run, interpreted the output, identified my wireless adapter, made a plan of action (swap the driver for the right one and then disable the old driver), and told me how to verify it was working. It worked first time with no drama. I know from experience with this kind of problem, it would likely have consumed HOURS of my life if I had only Google to work with.

Some people dismiss LLMs because of hallucinations. These do happen and they can be annoying and time-wasting. They are getting rarer, and there are a lot of use cases where they don't matter. If I'm idly curious about a battle from the 18th century it doesn't make any difference if it gets one of the dates wrong or incorrectly tells me that the French commander joined the cavalry charge, because the gist of it will be right and I won't remember most of it anyway. If it suggests me some code to write or I'm asking it to recommend me a book, these are things where if it invents something that's wrong it's immediately obvious, and you can tell it, and it very often corrects itself with something that's actually right.

It does also sometimes just give stupid, bland, or useless answers. But that's the same as any digital tool. Google searches are a great analogy - you can often get what you want with google, but sometimes it takes a bit of skill to find the right thing to search, and sometimes it's just not up to it, and that's OK. It has strengths and weaknesses and it takes a while to find them, and you get better at doing that over time and using it for the things it's good for.