by Eddie Garmat

What Can AI Do for You This Holiday?

I once tried to teach someone about math and I knew the material well enough to apply it, but not well enough to teach it. I just couldn’t get the ideas into words, and I think most people can relate to that. 

One of the ways to get past this is using AI to help explain a topic or expressing it. These are a couple of the many great ways to use AI chatbots. 

Some other uses are explorable during this holiday season! Furthermore, many of these uses transfer excellently into a more formal setting like work. In this blog, we’ll look at a few such cases and see how they transfer.

Reducing Food Waste

Almost everyone has something in their pantry they just can’t seem to use: some spice, canned goods, or Grandma’s gelatin molds that just sit there taking up space. With the help of AI, you can finally use these things and ensure they don’t go to waste. Modern LLMs are great at analyzing images. You can snap a picture of your pantry and tell a chatbot to use whatever products you want to get rid before the new year is in, finally clearing up that space. Afraid of leftovers? After the meal you can use AI to help find unique ways to use or repurpose them so they don’t go to waste. For example, for Thanksgiving, I had AI help me turn leftover turkey into a wonderful turkey hand pie.

Optimizing Grocery Shopping

Both reducing food waste and wasted money at the supermarket, AI canhelp you plan out your shopping trips before you cook. If you tell it what you have, your recipes, and number of guests, AI can help you precisely plan out how much of what you need to buy. It can also help you quickly adapt to dietary restrictions. By simply adding dietary restrictions to the info you give, it can tell you what ingredients you need to change, helping you adapt to these unique needs. This can help you reduce waste of both food and money, as well as avoiding any awkward extra trips to the store because you forgot, like, green beans.

Optimizing Cooking Schedule

If you’ve ever cooked or helped cook for the holidays, especially in a house with one oven, you know the process can be hectic. Planning out what needs to go into the oven at what temperature when, what needs to go on the stove, what ingredients need to be ready at each step, it all gets very overwhelming very quickly. With AI, you can tell it the tools and recipes you’re using and it can plan out an optimal cooking schedule for you with the tap of a button, saving you potentially hours and a tray of burnt-to-a-crisp rutabega.

Conversation Starters…and Savers

This season, AI can help with more than just cooking and shopping. If you have a hard time coming up with conversation starters, you can have AI help you generate a list of non-controversial topics to discuss around the table. You can even tailor it to your guests and the topics you anticipate coming up. We’ve all had moments around the dinner table where a family member brings up something uncomfortable – politics, a certain family member, or some other taboo. It can be really hard to get out of those situations, but AI can be great preparation. You can ask a model “What are some ways to get out of an uncomfortable topic at the dinner table?” If you know what topics might come up, that’s even better! You can specify what topics you want to get out of. 

AI can be very versatile in communication settings like these. For example, I asked ChatGPT to help me if a fringe political theory was brought up and how I could reshape the conversation. It gave me tips like: repeat the first sentence slowly, immediately start the redirect, and keep the tone light, not defensive. I asked it for a specific example like if the topic of Wikipedia came up and it gave me the dialogue: Uncle Terry: “Wikipedia is built on political lies!” ChatGPT: “Editing wars are intense, but nothing compared to baseball fans arguing over whether a hot dog is a sandwich. What’s your ruling? The nation is divided, but we don’t have to be.” Disaster averted!

AI in a More Formal Setting

All of these sound great to explore over the holidays, and once you’re acquainted with the uses in a fun setting, you can begin to implement them into a more formal setting like work, school, or a project. 

From reducing food waste, we’ve seen how AI can analyze images and repurpose existing data excellently which you can use to gain additional insights into work data you’ve already collected. From optimizing grocery shopping, we’ve seen how AI can create detailed plans for vague topics, quickly adapt to unique circumstances, and remember the small details. You can use this to create a work or study plan, help readjust after a change in your rubric, or as a way to track a project with lots of small details. From the cooking schedule, we can see that AI is great at optimizing schedules, which is helpful in a huge variety of situations. And with sticky conversation? AI is great at pivoting communications in a direction that fits the context, which is helpful for talking to a group or team member when it feels like something just isn’t clicking with them.

How Will You Use AI?

From communications to small details to grocery shopping, there’s plenty of ways for AI to help you with everyday tasks. There’s a whole host of ideas we didn’t explore! If you have an idea to implement AI, always feel free to try it in a simple setting. See how it goes! And let us know what you come up with: hello@aligniq.ai

Now you have the chance to try these for yourself. So get out there and use AI for good!

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