Where it genuinely helps.
PATTERN RECOGNITION
Finding regularities in large amounts of data that a person would miss or take too long to find.
LANGUAGE TASKS
Summarising, rewriting, translating, drafting, explaining. Modern language models are genuinely strong here.
GENERATING FIRST DRAFTS
Producing something to react to is frequently easier than starting from nothing.
REPETITIVE STRUCTURED WORK
Extracting fields from documents, categorising items, reformatting data.
ANSWERING QUESTIONS ABOUT PROVIDED MATERIAL
Give a system a document and ask about it. Reliable, because the answer is in front of it.
BRAINSTORMING
Producing many options quickly, from which you select.
EXPLAINING THINGS
Taking an unfamiliar concept and explaining it at the level you ask for.
WHAT THESE HAVE IN COMMON
The output is checkable, or the cost of an error is low.
WHERE THAT HOLDS, AI IS GENUINELY USEFUL
Where it does not, be considerably more careful.
