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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

> In our interviews with users, a common theme that’s emerged is a desire to better understand how, exactly, AI can be integrated into daily life.

I don't want to integrate AI into daily life.

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Then…don’t? You are free to not do so, while others (like myself) can choose the opposite.

Tell that to our employers

Using AI for specific tasks at work is definitionally not "integrating AI into your life."

You might use a badge to open a door at work but that doesn't mean your integrating badge-door access control systems into your daily life. It's a tool that you only use at work.

>how, exactly, AI can be integrated into daily life.

Aka "what is it good for?"

To be fair, the article doesn’t quite deliver on this promise. The examples are mostly focused on improving work-related workflows, so I guess that’s what they think “daily life” is.

To most of the people working on these AI systems I'm willing to bet work in 90% of their waking life or more.

If someone is doing something like that for 90%+ of their waking life it means it's not work; it's an enjoyable pastime for which they're being paid well.

Meh, I have it integrated as a replacement for search engines at this point.

I don’t even know that Claude is inherently better or if it’s more the lack of ads.

I did this but have (partly) reverted. I don't always want to read a wall of text that an AI regurgitates for search. The google AI snippet (1 short para) does seem better than the typical ChatGPT response.

I'd argue that it's not that Claude is better, but that Google has gotten worse.

Search engines without ads exist.

Try noai.duckduckgo.com. Decent search results, actual sources, no risk of hallucination, no extreme energy cost.

Kagi is an even better option, IME.

I don't know why this sentiment isn't more common. LLMs are basically two things: 1. chatbots 2. automation for the process of googling something and copy-pasting the first result. The only people I know who use it for more than those two things ask them to perform tasks they can't do reliably, don't check the output, and then they're just wrong most of the time. If they had just used it as slightly different google search they'd have been fine.

When I have a good idea that I can hit what I want in a single query, I still use search engines directly a lot. But I have found AI is pretty decent at automating the process of making a vague search, picking up from the search better search terms, then making a couple of other wrong searches, then refining down to what I really want and potentially pulling together an answer from multiple sources. I know how to do all that, but the AI can do in a minute what may take me 15 minutes.

I'd say I also know I can still do it, but... as the search engines deteriorate it is getting somewhat harder to do this by hand than it used to be. I still do this by hand sometimes for cases where I want the exploration of a topic for myself, rather than a focused answer where I don't really care about what I learn along the way, and it's getting harder. I don't know that it'll converge at "zero value" but the search result pages seem like they're just... harder to use for this than they used to be, though it's hard to put my finger on how.

Then this isn’t for you. That’s fine.

"Cool product you have there... but what is it for?"

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