Ask HN: What are the most interesting things you've used ChatGPT for so far?

I’ve enjoyed using it to create random test data in csv format, something I would usually do mashing together a few APIs and a Python script. Just today I asked for a large number of rows with several different column types, including first name, last name and random date of births in ISO 8601 format. After generating very US-centric names I asked for UK based names, which it again modified and generated a very sane dataset for, but I wanted it more culturally diverse, so a final re-prompt of “can you make the names more culturally diverse” and voila, it was done. What might have taken me an hour to produce in the past was done in 2 mins.

I’ve enjoyed having ChatGPT create stories for my niece. Basically I say, “what do you want to hear a story about?” And type her response into ChatGPT. We can even get more detail if she is particularly interested in one character or event, “tell me more about why the princess was late for the tea party.”

It’s like the ultimate version of those “choose your own story” books.

I used it to find “energy drinks that don’t contain taurine or much more than recommended daily amounts of vitamins“ and it did a great job. I had to tell it when it included a wrong result and it would output a more correct list though. AI will be GREAT for shopping.

My brother is an archeologist, and we recently talked about the transition from Bronze Age to Iron Age in Western Europe and how it impacted trade routes and local production.

He's quite interested in applying statistical tools to his research, like the Gini coefficient to determine inequality in burial objects. So, we used chatGPT to see if some modern economics concepts or tools could be applied to our discussion. The IA was great at giving a good overview and explaining relevant concepts. For fun, we asked to draft the outline of a research paper on the topic, which was quite sound!

ChatGPT is not bad for music recommendations.

I find that most ChatGPT output is better when you ask for "uncommon" results, like "What are the best uncommon ska albums?"

ChatGPT has been teaching me the differences between brackets in bash, redirections, and other stuff like that. I've used it for a number of languages I've never written before. Just the basics mind. It's good because I can ask it specific questions I would spend time trying to search for that I wouldn't ask if I was in a class learning it.