I have written a few articles about artificial intelligence that are somewhat negative, and all of those thoughts still stay in my head today, but I have noticed over the past few weeks that.

There are some serious benefits to using a decent AI setup and the cost is certainly good value.

I’ll give you some examples.

The back door handle on our double doors just fell off, it came out.

And immediately I’m panicking because I’m thinking, how do I let the dogs out?

How does my daughter come in and out of the house?

She’s in a separate building that’s attached to the house and what do we do?

So my first thoughts were to ring the people who put the doors in, get someone to come out, have a look and no doubt charge £100 for the call out, £100 for the work and God knows what for parts and I probably would be looking at something like £300.

I went on to ChatGPT and after a few minutes had taken photos, shown the mechanism with a ruler and managed to buy a replacement set up for the handle for 23 pounds.

Very easy to install, literally 2 screws, a bit of lining up, problem solved.

So I’ve saved myself £300 there.

Previous to that, our tumble dryer had stopped heating up.

My wife regularly cleans the filter.

So again, went to ChatGPT and there was a few different options of what could be the problem.

But it did go the extra mile and mentioned about how hard the filter is to clean and how you should be able to see right through it.

And it was only after we followed that and properly cleaned it over about an hour in the bath running hot water through it that we realised just how much fluff had got stuck in that filter.

We finished cleaning it, put it back in and it works fine.

That filter was about £60 I believe and the other part we were looking at was around £50.

It could have been a bit of a hassle to fit the other part so we were potentially looking at least a week without being able to dry clothes easily, which if you live in the UK you will understand is quite a common problem.

So yes, not a penny spent.

We could have at least spent minimum 50, potentially a lot more trying to get someone out.

We then had problems with the garage conversion we did and some idiocy on our part regarding planning permissions and building regs, which we didn’t feel we needed.

And ChatGPT again was able to break through all of the complexity and give us very specific advice for our area, our council, who to contact, what the issues likely were, and how to deal with it through the solicitor etc.

We are now in the process of rectifying that but it took so much complexity and in the space of a few minutes we were able to get things moving on the right path and feel a lot less concerned about the situation.

I’m now finding myself asking ChatGPT more and more when a problem occurs or when I simply want to identify a nice vintage watch I’ve seen somewhere to see what its actual value is and is the dealer charging too much.

And it’s kind of become my go-to place for information.

It just works.

It’s so far removed from a search engine.

It’s so quick at identifying issues and explaining what needs to be done in a way that you just wouldn’t get elsewhere.

Even on YouTube, a lot of the instructional videos don’t get close to the way the information is delivered through AI.

And in particular, the sort of slant on you can do this yourself, you can save some money if you just spend a few minutes making the effort

And it’s already taught me such a lot.

And this is on top of trying to track symptoms for my illness and so many other things that it’s become useful at.

So for like £6 a month, it’s easily good value for money.

I wouldn’t be surprised to say it saved me £1,000, which does make it hard to criticise.

Yes, it’s going to turn around and kill me one day and all of you reading this, but, well, supposedly, but for now, I do find it hard not to use the service because the benefits are tangible.

And extremely valuable.

Please don’t kill me, ChatGPT.

Categories: Articles