10 Actually Useful Things AI Could Do for Me
NOT Clickbait: Number 3 Will Make You Want to Smooch a Robot!
As a rule, I don’t use AI and I have no plans to start. I even had mixed feelings about using it to generate the header image up there but ultimately decided it might prove my point better than words will. (Verdict: Eh.)
Maybe I’m a Luddite, but it just doesn’t seem like AI does anything useful. Like, at all. I can’t use it in my professional life because its bad at coding and bad at Excel. I don’t want to use it in my personal life because the entire point of creative pursuits is the “pursuit” part. Also, my goal isn’t to make shitty garbage music or terrifying “sitcoms.” Remember this monstrosity? This was voluntarily uploaded! As a sign of good things to come!
In addition to royally fucking up art, AI is most notable for:
- Providing dangerous misinformation,
- Encouraging self-harm,
- Undressing people without their consent,
- Deleting entire databases out of guilt, and
- Poorly summarizing texts and emails that didn’t need summarizing.
Among many, many other missteps. (Like ruining the em-dash for all of us who where already using it.) It’s hard not to be cynical and think the corporate push for AI is a thinly-veiled ploy to get out of paying people for service/creative work. Anything to make sure the profit line keeps moving up and to the right!
But I’m reasonable. AI might be useless right now, but that doesn’t mean it always will be! To that end, I thought of 10 things AI could start doing that would improve my life immediately. Ball’s in your court, Silicon Valley.
Clearly identify itself as AI or AI-generated. Yes, it’d save us all a ton of time trying to discern what’s real and what’s not. But AI has a memorability problem, and self-identification would help. I can name the members of The Sugarhill Gang even though Rapper’s Delight came out in 1979. For all I know, my neighbors might be Yellowcard.
Start consuming and regurgitating Marxist literature. “Hey Grok, just how rich is Elon Musk?”
“There have been 739,638 days between January 1, 0001 and January 22, 2026. In order to accumulate the one trillion dollars he’s reportedly worth at Tesla, that would mean earning $1,352,012.74 every one of those days. His wealth is a glitch in the natural order of human kind and it’s only by freeing ourselves of the yolks of capitalist servitude that we can begin taking our collective power back.”
”Thanks Grok. Now show me a dog with big anime tiddies.”
”Consider it done!”Thanos Mode for PowerPoint presentations. An imaginary conversation I can see myself having a hundred times per year:
”Hey, great work on the deck, man! I especially respect how you’ve crammed a small table, three separate headers, and two paragraphs of text into a single slide. Whoops! I just clicked Thanos Mode and half your content is gone. And look at that! It’s still cluttered. Guess you’ll have to make your slides concise. For once.”Bring back Draft Champions mode in EA Sports games. You guys remember that? Where you get, like, a 79 overall team and then you get to draft one of 3-4 guys per round to fill out your roster with some serious star power? God that mode was cool. I don’t think AI can actually fix this, but if it can? Catch me sliding into Sam Altman’s DMs. Saucily.
Lifetime stats and overall ratings. Speaking of EA games, let’s get some stats and ratings in my life. How many people have I met in total? How many cups of coffee have I had? What’s the closest I’ve unknowingly been to any celebrity on the C-list or higher? For that matter, how popular would I have to be to get ON the list? What’s my rating, from 0-99, at Excel? Cooking? Writing? Puns? Which people are 99 overall? (I bet Timothee Chalamet is like a 94 but with 99 potential.)
If AI can’t tell us what video games do, it feels like we should let video games take over until AI is ready. Meet your new digital assistant, Crash Bandicoot!Walk my dog for me. I love my dog, obvs, and I love walking him. It’s a great way to get outside during stressful (or dull) workdays. But sometimes it’s 25 degrees and windy outside and I’m doing a crossword puzzle under a blanket inside. Sorry, Rock. You’re the closest thing I have to a son, but Claude’s gonna take it from here. I’ll follow along in an app and make sure you weren’t both hit by a Waymo.
Blackmail incels into getting therapy by withholding AI chatbot love/affection until they prove they’ve been going for at least three months. I believe we can all benefit from therapy. Some of us more than others. Way, way more than others.
Generate Shaq-tier nicknames for basketball players instantaneously. AI is already good at answering your prompts quickly. It’s just not very good at answering them accurately. And even when it gives you something creative, it’s more than likely by accident. Even a broken clock finds a squirrel sometimes, etc. etc. etc.
Personally? I think one of the most glaring areas of cultural erosion is the dearth of S-tier (the S stands for Shaq) nicknames among athletes and public figures. What comes to mind when I say Sweetness? Iron Mike? Magic? The Gambler? Iceman? Night Train? The King of Pop? These are all excellent nicknames of athletes (and two musicians) from bygone eras.
Who do we have now? Sid the Kid. TB12. J-Rod. These are boring. Can AI do better? Well, why ask rhetorically when we can demonstrate! I broke my own rule and asked Gemini AI this:
And here’s what it gave me:
We used to be a proper country. Shaq was naming guys like Paul Pierce “The Truth.” Where did we go wrong? Look, credit where it’s due: (The) Event Horizon is actually pretty excellent. It’s also perfect for a guy as long and lanky and physically bizarre as Wemby. He is the closest thing the NBA has to an alien, so the space theme is great, too.
But look at the rest of these. The High-Speed Rail? The Slo-Mo Saboteur? The Blue Print?? These are NBA stars, not fucking Hardy Boys capers. Also, the Ja Morant one feels less like a nickname and more just, like, an accurate description.
Anyway, I asked it to do the same with 10 random public figures:
“Did you guys see Tenet? The Chrono-Sculptor strikes again! Hey, come back!” Awful. Almost incomprehensibly bad. If you called any one of these people by these nicknames, there would be an FBI investigation into you immediately. Except Gordon Ramsay — he’d just stab you on sight.
Definitively answer hard questions. Nothing boring about purpose or passion or stupid shit like that. I want to know where we should order dinner from when my wife and I are both feeling lazy. I want to know where I left my GameBoy Advance when I moved 12 years ago. (I know I still had it!) I want to know how Steve Harvey keeps getting work. I want to know why the traffic cameras keep flashing when cars drive through nearby intersections at normal speeds and in accordance with the signals. Can AI answer that? Honestly, can anyone? I’m genuinely asking, it’s super confusing.
Teach me how to play any new board game without condescendingly reassuring me it’ll be fun once I understand all 30 pages of rules. You know what? Nevermind. That’s way too big an ask.
