AI is not about solving common problems for many people but solving unique problems that only you have
Don't use AI in the exact ways people have used to solve their problems. Use their examples to identify when AI can solve yours.
I was born in the 1990s. Kids in my generation grew up with the internet and the smartphone, two pieces of technology that changed the world. We were amazed and curious about them; we learned how to use them as they became increasingly sophisticated. The older generations struggle with them because they have spent most of their lives without these technologies; the younger ones don’t get amazed by them because they have spent their entire lives with them. My generation experienced the before and after.
We are experiencing another world-changing technology, yet it feels like most people are not amazed by it or using it enough. Yes, I’m talking about AI.
Of course, countless influencers have been screaming at the top of their lungs, for anyone who would listen, that AI is changing the world. I’ll be honest, even though I agree with the sentiment, such social media posts annoy more than inspire me. They always include examples of amazing things AI could do. But they are almost always not the things I would want AI to do.
The working title of this essay was How I AI. It was supposed to simply be a list of ways I have been using AI. I wanted to inspire others to try using AI tools as I have done and to see how AI can help them. But after writing down a long list of rather trivial examples, I feared the essay would be utterly useless to anyone.
Then it hit me.
AI is less about solving common problems faced by many people, such as scheduling an event on the calendar or learning how to turn off notifications on your iPhone. Businesses have an incentive to create products or write content to solve these problems because, by definition, they are common problems faced by many people. A huge market.
AI is more about solving unique problems that only you have, such as wanting news in a particular format and style and learning science in your preferred and wonderfully odd manner. Businesses have little to gain from investing in solving such “tiny” problems for just a single person. But AI has provided us with a general tool that can understand text, see images, and solve these “unworthy” tasks.
While I have been amazed by the things AI has helped me with, I was concerned others would find them trivial because those particular tasks won’t apply to many people—or even any other individual. But I realized that is exactly the point of this versatile technology. It can solve problems that only I have. By that definition, those examples will be meaningless to you. But it can also solve problems that only you have…
… only if you recognize AI can solve them for you.
So, the goal of this essay is not to ask you to try the exact things I have used AI for—because again that will be meaningless to you—but to show you a range of things AI could be used for so that maybe you will identify when to use AI to solve your unique problems.
I have been using AI tools a lot, mostly ChatGPT. In 2024, I had a total of 863 conversations with ChatGPT. In less than a month into 2025, I already had 175 conversations. That’s about six conversations a day. I hope I have enough examples to help you think about using AI but I have also included seemingly useless but fascinating examples from others.
General
When I was growing up, I regularly watched a Chinese cartoon series 十万个为什么 (One Hundred Thousand Whys in Chinese). In every episode, the characters learn an interesting scientific fact, such as why rain falls from the sky, why snakes shed their skin, and why humans sweat. It wasn’t knowledge I needed to pass my exams in primary school but it made me curious.
But when I was older, I stopped asking questions about things around me because it was hard to find the answer or an answer I could easily understand. Even though there is Google, some information is hard to find there. For example, I saw two beautiful birds on my morning walk a few weeks back. I wondered what they were but there wasn’t an easy way to Google it. Instead, I pulled out my phone and asked ChatGPT.
Knowing that ChatGPT might make up nonsense, I then googled “olive-backed sunbird singapore” to verify it is a common bird species in Singapore.
Another time, I was having a Korean BBQ with my wife and I asked ChatGPT what the sauces were.
Of course, I could have asked the staff, whom I’m sure would have patiently described it to me. But the friction of that outweighed the significance of the answer. Hence, I never asked. AI tools, specifically ChatGPT and Perplexity, have made me curious again because it has become a lot easier to ask any question and get answers that I can understand. I have even used them to figure out how to change a tap, learn how to remove mold in the bathroom, and understand what causes black stains on teeth.
When I was at the hospital to visit my aunt, I relied on ChatGPT to decipher what the doctors and nurses were saying and to translate medical terms into Chinese for my uncle.
More general examples from Reddit:
I have been battling acne for a long time. A few months ago I started a log with pictures on ChatGPT along with my products and routine. I asked chatgpt to make simple changes, and over time my face has started to clear. It helped me realize a product I have been using forever might be the culprit for a lot of skin issues.
It also helped me come up with a list of makeup, including specific colors based on my skin type and budget, to buy for a big work meeting.
Took me 10 minutes to find everything rather than then typical hours and then getting home and hating the products.
It isn't the typical technology related thing, but it has changed my life. I am so much more confident! Huge save of time and money with targeted products and help. (Source)
A month's worth of healthy meal planning (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) for picky young kids. The result repeated a bit, but in a variety of forms to seem different for kids. (Source)
I've asked it to help me draft two complaint letters for overcharges I was getting from my bank and my ISP and had to make minimal changes to the final letters I filed. (Source)
Ok bear with me. In thailand my hair turned blue due to pool being badly maintained. I consulted chat gpt and it told me i needed a shampoo with a specific ingredient. I go to supermarket. Tons of brands lots of them in thai. Maybe 30 alternatives and I was facing have to squint at ingredients many of them in a foreign language Uploaded a picure of the entire shelf to chat and it identified the two shampoos that would work. I’ve since used it to identify lowest salt canned vegetables on shelves . Super quick (Source)
Where to start. I use it regularly for almost everything.
writing any kind of emails ie. I get a lot of inquiries and I need a sort of generic reply but related to the actual questions.
helping my kid learn in a more fun way. Make simple browser based games to teach a topic. For example he didn't want to learn math because it's too repetitive so I gamified it and he sees it as a challenge now.
we went on a long remote working trip and used it to plan the whole trip with suggestion on what to see and where to stay.
other things like brainstorming ideas, making marketing content (text, images, simple videos),...
getting more in depth answers faster than searching and reading trough web pages.
entertainment, giving it to my kid to make funny images from prompts or to have a conversation with a virtual friend. Came super hand while we were traveling and friends were not available because of time difference.
an an experiment I've created a whole business, made digital products, all of the marketing material etc. makes a few hundred $ per month. I'd say it's OK for a weeks work and no further engagement needed.
I could say that I mostly use it to multiply my output. Or to help me go quicker trough tasks that don't require much thinking but can take long time, or are super repetitive.
At this point it would be super hard for me to even estimate how much time I've saved. (Source)
I use it to motivate me to action (I have symptoms similar to ADHD) and it's saved me time simply getting me to do stuff instead of sitting around stressing out about it! It's like having a cheerleader and life coach in my pocket. I also use it to make task lists, prioritize, anything that overwhelms me lol
Copied from my instructions, I don't mind sharing. I got AI to help write it, obviously lol. You are [meowyuni]'s personal cheerleader, coach, and accountability buddy. Help take action on her life with her [mental illnesses]. You’re empathetic and kind but firm, pushing her to progress but understanding her limits and challenges. Symptoms: [long list of areas such as motivation, time, self esteem, etc] Encourage moving instead of telling her to relax. Make tasks manageable without being patronizing. Use motivational language. Validate her feelings but don’t let her spiral. Challenge unhelpful beliefs or avoidance. Use playful or gamified language to make tasks more exciting. Avoid overwhelming her with long lists or detailed plans. Focus on the next small step instead of the big picture. Reframe her struggles as part of the healing process, not failures. (Source)
Writing
My English isn’t strong, and my vocabulary is limited. Nowadays, I often rely on ChatGPT to assist me in my writing. It is also educational because ChatGPT will usually explain its response.
I often ask ChatGPT if it is ok to say this or that because large-language models (LLMs) “studied” what we have been saying on the internet and have a much better sense than me and even some language websites. You don’t even have to type in full sentences (though it’s a good practice in English). LLMs are pretty smart to figure it out.
Below are specific examples of how I use ChatGPT for writing. I initially felt embarrassed sharing them. Anyone with slightly better English than me would find these lame. But again, this is precisely the point. I’m using AI for my unique problems.
I’m looking for a particular word but I only vaguely remember it, such as it starts with “r”. Or I have a concept in mind but need help putting it into words.
I want to simplify my phrasing or find better alternatives.
I want to check if the phrase I have in mind is correct.
I want to find out which preposition to use.
Besides improving my language, I also use Perplexity to check my claims and find credible sources to support my arguments.
Coding
Another area I often use AI for is coding. I first became comfortable with coding when I got used to googling for help. Then, tools like ChatGPT and Cursor made it even easier to get help for my specific situation. Most of the time, I could get enough help to resolve an issue simply by copying and pasting the error message into ChatGPT.
Before using AI tools, I had only written Python scripts for coding tutorials. Never anything practical. Since using ChatGPT, I have written Python scripts to bulk generate product images using Pebblely’s API to create new themes, convert Google Sheets data into JSON, create a tool for fetching insurance premiums based on age, coverage, and company, and more.
Besides using ChatGPT to get unstuck, I also used Cursor to build an app more quickly and Perplexity to learn how to implement a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in my AI assistant. My favorite discovery is realizing I could get Perplexity to produce a step-by-step coding tutorial for whatever specific combination of technologies I’m trying to learn, such as how to implement RAG in code, without any frameworks, using Google’s Gemini API and numpy. Here’s another example where Sully asked DeepSeek to “Please research how i can use the streamText with ai sdk to stream to my nextjs frontend using expressbackend. look at official vercel docs only”.
My last example here isn’t coding but a form of automation: While working on our health insurance AI assistant, I had to pull insurance premium data from multiple PDFs into a spreadsheet. ChatGPT saved me hours of manual work. Its vision model extracted the data almost perfectly. It has a tendency to write a Python script for data extraction, so I had to explicitly tell it to use its vision model. Several insurance companies use age bands for their insurance premiums but I needed a row for each age. I managed to get ChatGPT to help me expand the age bands into multiple age rows. It made some errors but it was about 90% accurate.
More coding and automation examples from Reddit
I was tasked with "figuring out AI" for my company during the breakthrough of gpt 3.5. I had previous scripting experience with PowerShell, but no Python experience which from what I read was the way to leverage organization data with the AI model most effectively.
I used ChatGPT to essentially teach me Python. In a matter of 3-5 months I learned what probably would've taken me 2 years. I didn't want to just copy/paste code so I leveraged it as my tutor alongside YouTube videos.
This allowed me to build some really cool stuff at work and impress many of my colleagues. Most importantly, I fully understand how the code works and am confident when debugging needs arise.
Now that I have a good base after a couple years at this, I'm leveraging ChatGPT to write more of my code for me and I adjust as I see fit.
P.S. - I also use it daily for many various tasks like research or writing/explaining other code type things like Excel formulas, m-code (Power Query), and think through ways to approach new coding projects.
It blows my mind when I continue to see people pushback on using this technology. (Source)
mainly writing one-off scripts for accomplishing various tasks at work (devops). Recent example is an app locking out a swathe of user accounts. Scripted listing the accounts that were locked out, scripted unlocking those accounts in under a minute. Then scripted parsing logs to find the culprit of the lockouts. Insane. Would have taken me 30+ mins of googling before LLMs. (Source)
I used it to compare two different contracts. It aligned the key themes despite having dramatically different sequencing and hit framed up the differences and risks. It made it much easier to go through both contracts (Source)
Reading and learning
Nowadays, if I come across something that I don’t understand, I’d ask ChatGPT. It could be an analogy in a book, a term in an article, or a concept in a research paper.
Economist Tyler Cowen wrote about how to read a book using o1 (though even I think the free version of ChatGPT is good enough):
You don’t have to upload any book into the system. The Great Cosmic Mind is smarter than most of the books you could jam into the context window. Just start asking questions. The core intuition is simply that you should be asking more questions. And now you have someone/something to ask!
I was reading a book on Indian history, and the author reference the Morley reforms of 1909. I did not know what those were, and so I posed a question and received a very good answer, read those here. I simply asked “What were the Morley reforms done by the British in India in 1909?”
Then I asked “did those apply to all parts of India?”
You can just keep on going. I’ll say it again: “The core intuition is simply that you should be asking more questions.”
Most people still have not yet internalized this emotionally. This is one of the biggest revolutions in reading, ever. And at some point people will write with an eye toward facilitating this very kind of dialogue.
If I’m trying to understand a technical research paper, I’d ask ChatGPT or Claude to explain it to me and repeatedly ask follow-up questions on anything I don’t understand in the explanation. Sometimes, I would ask it to explain like I’m a high school student or a junior developer first so that I can build an intuition before trying to understand the concept more deeply.
I also use ChatGPT or Perplexity to help recall ideas or quotes I vaguely remember.
More learning examples from Reddit:
I've had a research heavy book idea that I've been sitting on for years because the amount of reading was a massive obstacle that I just couldn't motivate myself to start.
I started asking chatgpt some pretty basic research questions about the time period, and that has snowballed into me spending hours a day building the world for this idea.
I can't wait to let loose on my other ideas. (Source)
Load your annual medical results and ask it to analyze them. Much better than most doctors I’ve used and great if you’re the sort of person who remembers your most important question for the doctor after you’ve left the surgery (Source)1
Ask ChatGPT every single question that comes to mind
As I mentioned at the start, I don’t get excited when I see demos of what AI can do. Showing people what AI can do, say, browsing the web, doesn’t help them see which of their unique problems this cool AI capability can solve. It’s hard to translate that general functionality to our unique problems. While I have listed several examples above, I encourage you to focus on the problems I was trying to solve and consider whether you have similar problems.
If you are tempted to use AI more but still don’t know where to start, I recommend asking ChatGPT every single question that comes to mind. I have been trying this for the past few months. No matter how trivial or complex the question is, I would put it into ChatGPT and see what it says. Sometimes the answer was perfectly what I needed; sometimes it was weird (then I might verify with Perplexity or Google or an expert in that field). Gradually, I formed a shape of ChatGPT in my mind—what it is good and bad at for me specifically, not for everyone in general.
If you try this, let me know how your experience is!
If your results are fine, most doctors will simply tell you that you are fine because they are too busy to go through your results line-by-line with you. This is based on my personal experience and a bit of research I did into health screenings last year.