Pod Insights The Vergecast We found stuff AI is pretty good at About this episode In this bonus episode of The Vergecast, Senior Reviewer Victoria Song sits down with a bunch of Verge staffers to talk about how they use AI tools in their everyday lives. Not all of it went smoothly — we definitely get into the ways these tools fall short — but we explore how AI can be used to help bedtime go more smoothly for parents, plan big cross-country moves, supplement your internet searches (always double-check!), and even vibe code an app for your next tabletop role-playing game.
If you have any examples where AI was useful to you, we’d love to hear them. (For what it’s worth, we’d also love to hear stories where it spectacularly failed.) Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you.
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Transcript 0:03 Speaker 00 Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of testing cursed technology. I'm your friend Vsong and I'm here with a special Sunday bonus episode. Yay. We're calling this AI for normies. So here's the concept. AI can be so open-ended. It's really hard for the average person to know what it's good for. And if you ask me, I don't think big tech is doing such a great job at explaining that either. But we here at theverge.com are a bunch of giant nerds and we test all of this stuff for a living. So I've asked a bunch of my colleagues
0:45 Speaker 00 to join me in talking about how they've used AI in their everyday lives. And I'm not talking about the canned demo examples that you hear at product launches that don't actually seem all that useful in real life. I wanted to know what they found to be actually helpful. And I also wanted to know what doesn't work. We have a mix of practical applications, some quirky ideas. And personally, I think my main use is a little unhinged. So stick around for The Vergecast and we'll see you after the break.
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1:56 Speaker 00 Hey, you're back. So Esther Cohen is our Director of Subscriptions at The Verge, and she recently used ChatGPT to help gather the information she needed before making a really big decision.
2:07 Speaker 02 So as of last week, our family of four made the really, really big change of moving from New York City, Upper West Side in New York City, to Miami Beach in Florida.
2:20 Speaker 00 Moving is really tough. I moved not a couple of years ago to New Jersey, and I never want to do it again. I never want to move ever again. I probably will, but, you know, it's really tough. It's really hard. And you said that you were using AI to help you figure out how to manage this logistical nightmare.
2:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, so I use the, I found myself using AI surprisingly a lot for my move in terms of planning, finding out information, finding out kind of how things work locally. Because when you're moving to a new state and a new city, like, the way things work are just totally different. But I would say the most helpful and surprising way in which I used AI for this move was actually for budgeting specifically. When you move from Manhattan, New York to Florida, your taxes are extremely different. And things like how much utilities cost, how much gas costs, how much traffic there is during the day in your commute,
3:28 Speaker 02 and so calculating how many miles your car at least should have. I was like hanging out with ChatGPT all day, asking those questions. So I was very surprised. I surprised myself by how much I used it every day.
3:45 Speaker 00 So one of the things with AI that, you know, people have trouble with is having to double-check that information. Did you find that it's so far? I know you just moved, so some of this will bear out over time. Did you find that those calculations were realistic? Were you worried about double-checking stuff?
4:02 Speaker 02 Yeah, so I'll take an example, like, basically figuring out what our new salaries and take-home pay was going to be, given the new tax situation. So I did a lot of ChatGPT prompting of like, if I make this much before taxes and I live in Belle Harbor...
4:22 Speaker 02 Miami, Florida, and I'm withholding as a single, whatever information I input. What's my take home pay gonna be? The first few times I did different versions of that, I did double check just to make sure. But part of why I leaned into ChatGPT was because I find doing math that is like related to different facts and like tax rules extremely, extremely daunting and overwhelming. So I, before I even get to the math, I'm like, do I even have the setup right? So I found ChatGPT super helpful because all I did was feed it like what I needed to know and then it did all that math for me. It explained all that math for me. And I'm happy to report, we just got our first or second paycheck as a family.
5:06 Speaker 02 With, based in Florida and the math pretty much checked out, down to the cent. So this is not a ChatGPT endorsement, but for tax and budget and salary planning. It was very accurate and helpful.
5:21 Speaker 00 Would you say that this was basically kind of making your life a lot easier as far as like pre-planning the move? But also, were there any things that you tried to pre, to like use ChatGPT for your move that didn't work out? And you were like, oh, this is not what, what I should be using AI for?
5:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, so I would say, great question. So it did make my life a lot easier because I got to a couple of dead ends where I would have had to like hire an accountant, for example, to figure things out for me. And I was able to just like ChatGPT it up and that was like an expense saved and time saved and kind of like having to hire one more service or one more person, like that got taken off the plate and that was really helpful. Where it was not helpful was for, I found, for shopping around or getting estimates of things. So like, I wanted to figure out, um, a thing that would have been extremely helpful for me was like, what's the? The right car for us, given the kind of size that we need, our budget,
6:23 Speaker 02 and also thinking about what the cost to insure it is. So again, this is moving and car rabbit hole. But sometimes, even if a car lease is cheaper, it'll be more expensive to insure it if it's not as as safe of a car or or sometimes like crossovers are cheaper to insure than sedans. So um I would have loved for ChatGPT to tell me, okay, get this particular car model, because even though the lease will be a little more, the insurance will go down. So it sucked at that. It did not give me accurate like lease pricing. It did not give me accurate insurance pricing. I had to get on the phone with the insurance broker and like figure all that out and call all different insurance companies before I got to the right one. So it was really, really bad at that. Same with movers. Like, I wanted to get a sense of like, how much will it cost
7:05 Speaker 02 to move a family of four in a three-bedroom apartment from Manhattan to Florida? And it did a lot of like basic Google answers, like it could be anywhere between six thousand dollars and twenty seven thousand dollars, depending on the following factors. So um I did not find it helpful when it came to shopping around. That would have been really nice if I could have had more help with that.
7:28 Speaker 00 Another question I had is like, how long did it take you to kind of figure out that, oh, this is something like this is something that I can do? Here's how I ask the AI the appropriate prompts to kind of get the answers that I need, because I found that like when I'm experimenting or using with different AI models, like the the real key is learning how to ask the question correctly. And I spend a I spend a lot of time in the beginning while testing, just learning how to ask the questions. I'm just curious how long that took you to kind of get in the groove?
8:01 Speaker 02 It took me a minute to figure out what the right way to approach this was with ChatGPT. I did a lot of like, explain to me how taxes in Florida work um kind of prompts in the beginning, and those were utter failures and did not give me the info that I needed. I thought I could get the tools to do the math myself. And then I finally realized, oh, what if um this I really just treated like an accountant and I'm like, here's how much I'm making, here's my paperwork, figure out how much I'm gonna take home every month. Once I did that and I figured out, I I can literally redo my prompt. It was like, if I make X amount of money and have this many dependents and live in my neighborhood, how much take-home pay will I bring every paycheck or something? And
8:46 Speaker 02 It literally was able to do the math, explain to me what all the different like deductions and with sorry withholdings are, lay that all out for me and then give me a yearly amount and a monthly amount. So that was amazing, but it did take me a minute to get there because I, I think as someone who is a collaborator and likes to figure things out on my own, my first approach was like, okay, let me ask chat GPT for the tools to figure this out. And it took me a few steps before I was like, no, the whole point is that I don't want the tools. I want chat GPT to do the figuring out for me. Once I did that, it was smooth sailing.
9:21 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's, it's, it's sort of like a, a catch 22 because you have to know what you want, but you're also trying to go in without knowing what you want and figure these things out. So like I find that I spin wheels a lot of times when I'm trying to trying to really get my answers. So then if you could do this move all over again, or if you have, uh, if we have listeners out there who are, you know, on the verge of a move, do you have any advice for them?
9:49 Speaker 02 If you need to lay something out very clearly before making a decision to move, like whether it's your budget for moving, what your new salary is going to be, um, any kind of logistical problem that you're trying to solve as your decision making, chat GPT is your friend. I find sometimes when we're making a really, really big, um, daunting life decision, what I personally struggle with, um, is when there's so many moving pieces before you can even make the decision, like, so like I, I personally really struggle with like the whole, there's so much to figure out before we even do the thing of it all, that it's actually been really, really nice to have a tool that like gathered up,
10:35 Speaker 02 I would say three quarters of that, right? Like, there isn't that much to figure out. We can figure it out with our computer and like with a glass of wine and two hours, I can do a lot of that, like figuring out like groundwork before actually having to make a decision or do the big thing. And that was like personally and like emotionally a huge, um, a huge crutch and a huge help for me.
10:59 Speaker 00 I love that. Thank you so much. I'm, how, how far are you along? Are you on unpacking? Are we, are we like 10% of the way there? 0% of the way there?
11:08 Speaker 02 We're like 3% of the way there.
11:12 Speaker 00 I mean, I I moved over a year ago and I think 18 months ago, maybe. And I'm still somewhat unpacking. So, yeah. Yeah, that's just how it goes. Godspeed. Good luck. All right. Thanks, Esther.
11:28 Speaker 02 Thanks, B. Love talking to you. Bye.
11:32 Speaker 00 Next up, Allison Johnson is our senior smartphone reviewer, which means she's had to test a lot of different AI assistants over the last two years. Here's what she found most useful.
11:44 Speaker 03 Definitely my favorite, like, and it's not even close, is using AI to put stuff on calendars. I don't know how it's possible to be bad at calendars, but I am bad at doing calendars. If there's like a way to mess up putting something on a calendar, I will do it. Like, without fail, I'll put something on the wrong day or the wrong calendar. And my husband's like, what are you talking about? You don't have an appointment this weekend. I'm like, actually, I do. So the bar is already really low. I think that's important, that like, AI really can't mess this up more than I'm already messing it up. So it's the perfect candidate for like, maybe AI can do this.
12:28 Speaker 03 This has been something that's been like in the works with Gemini on Android phones for a while. And I would like, to be honest, the first like few weeks, maybe a month, I tried it. It like consistently got stuff wrong and like would insist that I was leaving. Uh, I had a flight out of the wrong airport. I was like, ready to give up on this whole concept. But it's, I don't know what they did. They did something behind the scenes. It works. It like works so well.
13:02 Speaker 03 Um, that I am just like never gonna do my own calendar again, I think. On any Android phone, you'll like summon Gemini and you tap something that says, um, ask about this screen. And then if there's, it'll kind of like take a screenshot and it looks for dates and stuff. And if this sounds like, did we need AI to do that?
13:30 Speaker 03 Um, yes and no. Uh, it'll, it, it's really smart, actually. It'll ask you like follow up questions about what's on the screen. It can, um, sort out like time zones. Like it will, will put something on my calendar for the correct Eastern time, time zone.
13:50 Speaker 03 And that, that'll be reflected. So it's like, it's the ideal kind of like AI tool, I think, where it's, it's sort of low stakes. I wasn't doing it great to begin with and it's pretty easy. So I, that's like my first AI on a phone thing where I'm like, yes, a hundred percent. I want this and I'm going to keep using it for the rest of time.
14:17 Speaker 00 And so this is like Android, Android phones only. There's no hope for us on iOS yet?
14:23 Speaker 03 There is hope. iOS has it. It is an Apple Intelligence feature. It's like pretty good. Uh, I would say not as good as Gemini. It doesn't do the like follow up questions. It did get tripped up on a time zone thing once. But again, if the bar is very low for you, and it is for me, it's like something to start with. And then you, you fix a couple of things and you usually get there.
14:53 Speaker 00 So like, what's been most useful for you in terms of like these calendar adding? Is it like flights? Is it, uh, I don't know. I don't have kids, but I have been told by parents that kid schedules are absolutely banana bonkers. Appointments is everything. Like, is there a particular thing that this calendar? AI magic is is best for.
15:16 Speaker 03 It is 100% the kid's stuff. And I didn't fully grasp it until you have a kid in school or like my kid's in daycare, but it's like a preschool program. And you will get an email with the most insane list of dates. And it's like crazy hair day is Friday. And it like, the information will not be complete. You know, it's like raptor visit on such and such day. Where your pajamas to school on this day. And going through all those things and adding on a calendar manually is a nightmare. And also it sucks if you send your kid to pajama day and they're not wearing pajamas. Like, it's so sad. But this is like 1,000% the best use case for it.
16:01 Speaker 03 Cause you do the screenshot, it scans the whole thing. And it's like, I added all this to your calendar. And then, then your kid isn't like sad when they show up on crazy hair day. But to be fair, my kid has crazy hair day every day. So we're covered there, but.
16:18 Speaker 00 My immigrant parents would have been like, you're not doing that. Just be sad.
16:23 Speaker 03 Yeah, maybe I'm depriving him of like a learning experience where it's like, well, sometimes you don't do crazy hair day on the right day. But for the most part, I think it's been good for everybody.
16:37 Speaker 00 Yeah. Is there anything else that you found particularly useful?
16:41 Speaker 03 We were having like the worst time with kid bedtime. This is a thing that happens throughout like early parenthood. Like kid sleeps great. You're like, this is amazing. I can read a book and like relax at night. And then all of a sudden it goes completely off the rails and you're like negotiating every little tiny thing. And you're like, please, dear God, I just, I need this hour to myself. So I was like, kind of desperate and I went to the AI. And I was like, describe the situation we're having his age and like, I was like, help me out. Like, what can we do? And it goes and finds whatever relevant like things on Reddit there are like it's it's always Reddit.
17:26 Speaker 03 Like, there's so many parenting things on Reddit. But it kind of like brought it all back and was like, you could try this, this and this. And I was like, okay, I want to try this thing in this thing. Can you put this all together in a, I called it a playbook? Cause like, I need to communicate it to my husband. And he he will get overwhelmed if I just kind of sit down. I'm like, we're doing this thing. He has two passes. He can use a pass. We sit for five minutes and the, you know, it's like so convoluted. But it spit it all, it like explained everything. There were subheads. It was very like logical.
18:09 Speaker 03 And the funniest thing is the thing it could not do. I was like, great, can you put this in a Google Doc for me? And it was like, I'm sorry, I can't. It's Gemini though. I know. This is a Google platform. Yeah, like I have all the little like plugins for all the, I don't know why it couldn't do a Google Doc. But it literally was like, you can use command, you know, V or whatever, like copy and paste it. And it the, I was like, okay, let's don't explain copying and pasting to me, machine. But the kicker is like, this honestly did work. Like, it's it's probably a little more complicated than it needs to be.
18:54 Speaker 03 And we've we've like tweaked the system a little bit. But like, I sent my husband the playbook. He read it. We we went into bedtime like just ready. We're like a united front. And and it has worked. So did did Gemini just like read a bunch of Reddit threads back to me and like format it? Probably. Do I feel good about that? I don't, I'm not a hundred percent sure, but like. I need, I need that kid to go to sleep.
19:31 Speaker 03 And that has happened. So I, I'm like, well, all right.
19:35 Speaker 00 My real life bedtime story AI thing was like, for a while, I was just like, really struggling to fall asleep. So my spouse actually was just asking AI to generate bedtime stories for me like I was a child.
19:51 Speaker 03 That's adorable.
19:53 Speaker 00 Just like based on our family. So like, they generated a story about my cat Petey becoming a cult leader. And how Pablo, our other cat, brought upon his downfall. And I don't know what prompt they used, but it was like, kind of good.
20:14 Speaker 03 Oh my god.
20:15 Speaker 00 If I were to like, try and publish the story, I wouldn't because it's just so hyper-specific. But if I just needed like, a quick, really funny bedtime story to listen to for myself to fall asleep. We've actually kind of done that every once in a while and just been like, absolutely shocked. So yeah, it was like, I forget the title of it, but it was just like, Petey Starts a Cult was the title. And I was the number one cult follower. I didn't use any critical thinking in this AI story. And I was like, oh, that's actually quite accurate. Pablo, our other cat, would be the one to.
20:56 Speaker 03 What, like, what is, what is a cat if not a cult leader? You do their bidding. They're a little bit evil.
21:05 Speaker 00 Yeah, I'd be like, ideally, it would, would it have meant more if my spouse had actually written that story? And, and like, presented it, yes. What I needed, I am the child in this scenario. I needed to go to bed right away. So they just like whipped it up. And that was like, a good running saga for a week. And I was like, yeah. This is actually kind of cute and adorable. So, you know,
21:32 Speaker 03 I would 100% read Petey the cult leader, by the way.
21:37 Speaker 00 I'll see if I can get the transcript because that was, that was truly just fundamentally the most, I, you know, I actually almost didn't go to bed. I was laughing so hard.
21:49 Speaker 03 Right. That's the danger.
21:51 Speaker 00 That is the danger, but we're just trying to help people go to bed.
21:55 Speaker 03 We just want some rest. We all just want some rest.
21:59 Speaker 00 That's, that's all we want. Thank you, Alison. I'm sure the parents will now have some other tools in their arsenal.
22:08 Speaker 03 Please, yeah, message me on threads. We'll, we'll brainstorm. We'll bring Gemini into it. Yeah.
22:15 Speaker 03 We'll get through it together.
22:16 Speaker 00 So we're going to go to break and when we come back, Jake will tell me his tips for how to best use AI for search. Cause you know, AI sometimes do be lying. See you soon.
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23:02 Speaker 00 We're back. So it's pretty hard to search for anything on the web these days without an AI large language model butting in and telling you to put glue on pizza or something like that. Jake Kastranakis is our executive editor and he's been figuring out how to use AI to help him find actually accurate information. A thing that I thought could not be done.
23:24 Speaker 06 Well, for one, I it is actually changing how I search online. You know, I think for good reason, people are very skeptical of using ChatGPT or Gemini as a search engine, right? Sometimes it's wrong. It is that is in fact very true. But one thing that's interesting is that over the years, I've heard Google executives saying like, oh, you know, all these kids, all these people who grew up smartphone first, you know, they don't they don't search the same way all of us do, right? And I'm in my mid thirties, I think anybody, you know, my age, anybody who's been using Google for decades, when you do a search, right? You're very precise and specific, right? You enter a couple of keywords to get exactly what you want, right?
24:04 Speaker 06 If you want to figure out how much RAM the iPhone 16 has, you just type in iPhone 16 RAM. You're not going to type out that whole question. There's a bunch of extra words, they're going to get filtered out, they might, you know, pull up search results you don't want. With ChatGPT, you really do just type in the question and that allows you to get more specific and get nuances that you wouldn't be able to get. And this might, okay, my example right now is one that I use for work, but I think it shows what these tools can do in a way that a normal search engine couldn't. So recently, we covered that Reddit says it wants to become a search engine. That's like, that's really weird. That's a big idea. And so I wanted to make sure, okay, has Reddit said before that it wants to become a search engine?
24:49 Speaker 06 So I went to Google, right? Typed in Reddit search engine. Well, that's not a very good search because number one, it first off, you just get a ton of results of of from Reddit, right? All the results are from Reddit about search engines. Okay, well, so now you gotta you gotta know how to filter out Reddit searches. That's easy. So I filter out Reddit searches. Now it's just a bunch of stories about how everybody's using the Google hack where you just type in Reddit to your search. Okay, so because the keyword search is too messy, there's too many results, I can't actually find what I need here. So I go to ChatGPT to see, okay, can it find this for me? So I type in, hey, I'm looking for examples of Reddit, the company, or its executives
25:33 Speaker 06 saying that they want the company to be seen as or operate like a search engine. And that's like pretty specific, right? And it's able to sort through all of that. And it came back to me with a bunch of results and it says, okay, Reddit hasn't said it wants to become a search engine. But here are some similar quotes from executives where they're saying things about how Reddit's thinking about search or how search is a valuable opportunity. And so it's able to sift through all these
26:08 Speaker 06 other stories that are irrelevant, but have the right keywords and find the specific things. Now, here's the trick, right? Everybody's worried about AI being wrong.
26:17 Speaker 00 Right.
26:18 Speaker 06 And I think when it comes to quotations, that's an area where AI is really likely to make stuff up. And so particularly for our jobs, we have to make sure everything is correct. And so fortunately, now ChatGPT does a thing where it will give you web links. So I clicked through these and in this case, they were all right. And so that was fantastic. That was really useful and I was able to use this to help me suss out whether they had made claims like this before. I will say as a counter example, I tried a very similar thing when Apple said, okay, we're going to make all of the glass for the iPhones in the US. And I was like, okay, ChatGPT,
26:55 Speaker 06 how much of the glass is already made in the US? And it just made up a quote. It just made up a quote for me.
27:02 Speaker 00 Yeah.
27:02 Speaker 06 Right? So you've got to check. You have to check. But I think it's the same thing with, right? With Google where you have to have the skill set.
27:10 Speaker 00 I know. This is like a super interesting example because I have a much sillier problem that really mirrors what you were saying. Like, um, so I have been watching Law and Order SVU because I found out my spouse had never seen an episode of Law and Order recently. And I was like, what? This is blasphemy.
27:27 Speaker 06 Like 900?
27:28 Speaker 00 There's like 20, there's 24 or 25 seasons of Law and Order SVU. I actually wasn't aware that it was still going, but we started watching it and, you know. Uh, he had seen clips before and he's like, I did Ice, does Ice T always have a ponytail? In, in Law and Order SVU? And I was like, well, you know, he changes up his look. I don't recall him wearing suits all the time either in the first season. Uh, cause I think normally he wears something more like a leather jacket. So I went into Google and I was like, when does Ice T lose the ponytail in SVU? Uh, I got nothing useful. And then I was like, okay, let me try the Reddit thing. Let me see if there's a Reddit
28:13 Speaker 00 community that talks about it. All I found were Reddit's voting on whether they like bald Ice T or ponytail Ice T better. I could see that there was like some sort of-
28:22 Speaker 06 Who's winning?
28:24 Speaker 00 Um, it was pretty even. There were like people just who were pro ponytail Ice T, pro bald Ice T. But you know, I wasn't getting a when does he, he change his look thing? So I went to perplexity. Because you know, I'm trying, like, like you, I'm testing all these things and perplexity calls itself an AI search engine first. And, um, it told me like the exact season. And I was like, oh my God. And there were like links saying the exact season. So I was like, oh, at the end of season three, beginning in season four. That's when he changes his look. That's early. It's very early considering there's 24 seasons of this show. But it, it gave me the answer of like exactly when that, that like I'll, I'm in season three now. So we'll, we'll see if at the end,
29:09 Speaker 00 that when we switch to season four, um, whether he becomes bald. But it, it's, it's a very silly example, but it's, it's kind of what you were referring to.
29:21 Speaker 06 No, I think that's so interesting. And, and I think it really speaks to the fact that the types of searches you can do are changing. And, and I think that is the big thing to tap into, right? And so I do think there are people who are maybe missing out as a result of, of being too skeptical that AI can be useful. So I actually had another really interesting ChatGPT use case, literally just this past week.
29:49 Speaker 00 Tell me about it.
29:51 Speaker 06 I've been trying to get work done in my apartment. And so I have this big open room and I want to kind of put up a wall to turn it into a bedroom. Right. Split it in half. It's a little bedroom, little office. And so I started thinking, okay, let's let's ask chat GPT for ideas. And honestly, it was not very helpful, right? I described the project. It didn't really, you know, I think it's it's not great at like giving me image generation that that is consistent, coherent and makes sense. I already had pretty clear ideas on my own of like where to put this wall. So like, it wasn't too complicated. So that didn't really help me.
30:33 Speaker 06 But one thing I did was that you can keep going back to the same chat GPT thread over and over again. And so, you know, I've been, this is something I've been working on for like months at this point. And, you know, every time I had an idea, I would just go back to this thread and, you know, I don't have anybody to toss these ideas around with, right? Like, I don't have like a professional I can I can talk to because I need to hire that person.
30:58 Speaker 06 And so I, you know, I would like bounce things back and it would give me some some ideas to think through. And anyway, I finally got a contractor to work with me about a week ago. And the contractor sends over a quote, right? And so I paste the quote into chat GPT. And it has like a breakdown of all the all the work this person is supposed to do for me. And I say, hey, are there any questions I should ask about this? And chat GPT goes, well, it doesn't list the closet that you wanted to add. And that was a mind blowing moment for me because I had told chat GPT months ago that I needed to put up a wall to add a closet.
31:39 Speaker 06 And I had told the contractor this in person, but in their estimate, they they had forgotten to include that. And it had noticed that they didn't include it and I had missed it. I had missed that the closet wasn't there. And, you know, that's like pretty important, right? It is important that we we have in writing ahead of time. The the work that this person is going to be doing and the fact that I had missed it, I thought was like, yeah, that that really, really sent me for a trip.
32:06 Speaker 00 That gets to another thing that I've been thinking about, like in my testing, which is like, the best scenarios I found for AI chatbots is just like thinking of it as me talking to myself in the mirror, but the mirror version of me has like a Google access and like a running list of everything that I said I wanted. So like, I don't know if I believe all of the hype where these big tech companies are like, AI is going to be your companion. It's going to be what I like. I I find it more useful when I think of it as like, I'm talking to myself because I don't have a sounding board and I need a sounding board. And all the other people in my life who I would use as a sounding
32:47 Speaker 00 board are, one, tired of hearing me talk about this, or, two, currently unavailable. So like, I like you, I have these like different project things that I've been like iterating on, brainstorming on, where it's just like, oh, I don't want to bother someone just yet because I am going to take something to someone and do a real in-life meet person hashing out of ideas, but I want to go in prepared. I want to like have thought through the stuff already. I want to know what questions I should ask, or like, have I missed something after like what I said those things? And in that sense, it's been pretty useful. Still not useful at times, like in the beginning, which gets to my other issue with AI is that
33:32 Speaker 00 you have to do so much training for it to get to that like little nugget, which is pretty labor intensive. But when it works, you're just kind of like, ah, look at that.
33:42 Speaker 06 No, that's such a good way to think about it. Like, I think you're right. And it's it's funny. Like, I think people get very concerned, rightfully so, about like where this is taking away people's people's jobs. And I think in these cases, like, it really is just talking to myself. It's in a lot of ways. It's like talking to, yeah, you're right. It's like talking to myself with Google, who's just able to spit stuff back at me.
34:05 Speaker 00 Yeah, I wish we talked about this kind of way to use AI more instead of like the, I get why companies do the flashy marquee versions, but this I feel like is more useful framing.
34:18 Speaker 06 I will say, there's a limit to this. There are also those stories of the people who are like, Go off the deep end and like ChatGPT told me I can run through a wall and you're like, no, no, no.
34:31 Speaker 00 No.
34:31 Speaker 06 Like you still gotta, still have to like use all of your like good judgment and instincts here. If you use it rationally, I think there are actually some like very like simple ways it can kind of, you know, just make you more productive or able to think through things a little bit more clearly. It's not like I would have not been able to accomplish these things without AI. But, you know, it was a lot easier and a lot more fun than having to search through a million forums on, you know, how walls are put up, right? Now, it's true, that does lead to the downsides, right?
35:15 Speaker 06 You know, we've been writing quite a bit about how Google search traffic is declining and I think some of this is because of AI. And it's like, right, okay, so all these, you know, construction forums that I probably would have read through, you know, are not getting my traffic and that absolutely leads to issues. On the other hand, it's hard to argue that that would have been a better experience for me than having a tool that can just give me a readout.
35:44 Speaker 00 Totally. And, you know, we'll see. I don't think you can put it back in the box at this point. So you might as well figure out how to make it work for you in some ways. Some ways, like find the practical because it's getting shoved down your throat, whether you like it or not. At least with search, it's helping with the fact that Google is no longer what it used to be.
36:09 Speaker 06 There is this idea forever that Google could not be toppled, right? Nobody could build a better search engine than Google. And it's true. I think like, nobody has built a better search engine than Google. However, it turns out this other product is quite competitive. And it has challenges. It absolutely does. But so does Google. And I think the key is knowing what the difficulties are and knowing where you need to be careful and apply your judgment in both cases.
36:38 Speaker 00 That's so simple, but also. The rub, the applying, the applying your good judgment, I think, is a thing that we're all.
36:47 Speaker 06 So, so much less fun if you just believe everything it says.
36:50 Speaker 00 Yeah, so much less fun. And also, like, you can have good judgment or believe you have good judgment and then find, oh, I got fooled. I gotta practice a little bit more. But to your point, the good judgment part is key. Well, that was enlightening. Thank you so much for, you know, talking with me about how you're evolving your search process. I think that was like, really helpful to just chat that out and also made me realize that I also am kind of going through that same process myself. But yeah, thank you so much.
37:24 Speaker 06 No problem. Good to talk with you. Thanks for having me.
37:26 Speaker 00 Last up, Travis Larchuk produces the Vergecast and he's actually been vibe coding. We found someone who actually has vibe coded using Google Gemini to help him with admin for tabletop role playing games.
37:40 Speaker 07 I run an RPG online for some friends over, what are we using now? I think we're using Discord now. This is an original world. It is inspired by Pokémon. And so what the players are doing is they are these trainers, they're going around and capturing these creatures or finding other trainers who have their own creatures to battle against them. And this is an original rule set that I created. And one of the things that I wanted this world to have was that the creatures would essentially be randomized. Like, I don't know if
38:21 Speaker 07 procedurally generated is the right term for this, but basically, like, I wrote a rule set of like, here's everything that a creature could be, like, here are the moves that it potentially could have, like, here's how many bonuses it can have at this level. But I didn't want to, like, have a bunch of lists printed out where I just, like, roll dice to, like, see on each table, like, each thing that the creature would be. So I fed the rule set into Gemini and told it what I wanted it to vibe code for me. And so I will now share with you and our video audience the app and I will do my best to describe it for the audio audience. Here is.
39:07 Speaker 07 The Crystal Spirits Generator.
39:09 Speaker 00 Oh.
39:09 Speaker 07 These are called Crystal Spirits, which I think also sounds like a Boons Farm style. Pretty wild. Okay, so Crystal Spirits Generator at the top of the page. It lets you select number of spirits you want to generate from one to four. The level of the spirits that you're generating from one to six. Which biome they're going to be generated in. This world has color coded biomes according to the visible light spectrum. So I'm going to generate, let's see, two spirits. Level three in the the blue biome. All right, we'll generate. And so we've got, it also automatically determines their initiative order for combat as soon as they're generated.
39:53 Speaker 07 And gives them a name randomized from a list of, I think, about 200 real animals and fictional creatures that I also fed into Gemini. So we've got octopus crab is the first creature that was generated. It is a water creature.
40:11 Speaker 00 This is amazing.
40:13 Speaker 07 It's combat die is a D eight. It's a drag, it's on strength is two. So it's interesting, like the way that you do this, it's like you ask Gemini for a cake and then it gives you a cake. And then you taste the cake and you're like, can you make me another cake? But like useless. It's just like you're getting all of these like fully formed cakes, right? So each time it'll like create this thing and then, you know, you have to test it to make sure that it's implemented the rules correctly. And then you make little tweaks. So, so yeah, this is what I've been doing with my time with Gemini.
40:46 Speaker 00 Oh, my goodness. How long did this actually take you to make? Because like, you know, I think we've heard the term vibe coding a bunch recently in all of these, you know, developer conference keynotes. Did you have like the basics of programming in your head? Like, did that help inform how you were going to do this? Or did you just go like? Here are the rules Gemini, make a thing.
41:12 Speaker 07 I went, here are the rules Gemini, make a thing. Like, I know very, very basic coding. It was something that I was actually really good at as a kid and then my life, like, it was one of those moments where two branching paths present to themselves and I went on the one that didn't make me an insanely rich engineer. But yeah, so I mean, like, I'm, I'm really into like tabletop games in general, like board games and like, what is, what are, what is, what are instructions to a board game other than like a extremely simple set of like rules and code, right? So it's not like too far of a stretch to take that and then give that to Gemini and ask it to create an interactive out of it.
41:56 Speaker 07 The, the parts that take a lot of time, like it, it basically like what you're seeing here are like, there are a bunch of, it, it's a very simple looking app, but there are buttons that have like different colors associated with them. Like, I didn't ask it to do any of that. Like, it picked all the fonts that like, pick the emoji that it uses when it's showing that something is like a water element. All of that stuff like Gemini came up with by itself. But the thing that does take time is like you experiment using it, you realize that it misinterpreted a rule that you gave it and then you have to convince it that it's wrong. Because sometimes it'll be like, well, I did that for you. And you're like, no, you didn't.
42:37 Speaker 07 Like, please try again.
42:38 Speaker 00 Was it just something that you were like, hmm, I don't want to have all these sheets. Let me see if AI can do the thing? Or was it something that you found other game masters have been doing that you've heard of? Like, is this a Travis original idea? Did you find it on Reddit? Like, what, what sparked this as like a reason to use AI?
42:58 Speaker 07 So there are, there are a bunch of, of systems that work for existing like games, like for example Dungeons and Dragons. There are plenty of places online that you can go to and your, your character sheets are already in there. Like, you know, the, the Dungeon Master, basically all they have to worry about is coming up with whatever challenges the players are going to have to face next. Like, all of the rules for. The enemies are baked in, like rolling the dice, that's all baked in. Because this is an original game system that I came up with. And I don't know how to code something like that for me. I figured I would just see if it worked.
43:39 Speaker 07 And yeah, I think it worked a lot better than I expected it to. I mean, in terms of AI, like I wouldn't want to use it to ask it like, "Hey, so what should happen next in this story?" I'm like, the entire point of playing the game is that we are coming up with what happens next in the story. So I wouldn't want to use it for that. But I think for sort of this admin use case, I'm, I'm pretty happy with it. It, it does something that would be a lot more complicated for me to do on the fly. Like it would be possible, but I would just be like, hang on everybody. And then I like, I gotta roll a D100 right now.
44:24 Speaker 07 Okay, the first part of the animal is fish, you know? Like I could, I could do that, but instead I basically wrote all of that down and then told Gemini, like make a thing that does that for me.
44:38 Speaker 00 I feel like you just described what I think, you know, the real use case of AI should be, which is taking the tedium out. Because to your point, I can just imagine all the various dice that you have clattering on a table and then it falls off the table. And then you're like, hang on guys, I gotta figure this out. Oh, now I gotta find the dice. Oh, my cat is taking the dice in. And just kind of interrupting the game flow. So just like offloading the admin, but keeping the creative bits to yourself. Like, I feel like that's what we should be doing instead of just saying that AI is gonna do it all for us. So I, I don't know.
45:18 Speaker 00 I feel like this is a very cool, nerdy, after my own heart as a, as a, as a board gamer way to use AI. I love it.
45:27 Speaker 07 Thanks, B. Bye.
45:28 Speaker 00 One more break and when we come back, I'll tell you what I've personally been using AI for. This is The Vergecast.
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45:47 Speaker 05 I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.
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46:10 Speaker 00 All right, we're back. Time for me to confess the very, very silly thing that I have been using AI for. So to bring it back a bit, a couple of years ago, I kind of fell into the astrology rabbit hole on TikTok. And I'm not talking about, oh, you just look in your weekly horoscope and you look at your sun sign. I'm in Aries and you go, oh, this is what's going to happen for Aries. No, I got into the extremely nerdy version of this, which is natal birth charts. Oh yeah, it takes your time of birth, where you were born, and depending on the status of the stars in the sky at that point in time, you can apparently learn a lot about yourself and what's going to happen.
46:55 Speaker 00 And it's absolutely, it's absolutely crazy. I want to preface this by saying that I don't really believe in a lot of it, but there's been some batshit things happening over the last couple of years. And when you feel that there's no hope, I don't know, sometimes I feel a little better going and looking at my natal chart and going, oh, Mercury is in retrograde and that's why everything is sucking. Yay. You know, and just going on with my life because I don't know, that's there. So at the start of this journey, I was using the app CoStar. You may have heard of it. It's an AI powered astrology app and it's pretty well known for being very sassy in
47:38 Speaker 00 its horoscopes, but also very surface level. Like if you want to go deep into stuff and kind of get some really nitty gritty insights, which, you know, it starts off being fine, just getting roasted by an AI saying like, Girl, Mercury retrograde is happening, so get your shit together, you sad sack. Like, you know, that kind of vibe of thing. You know, after a while, you get really into something, you want to learn more, you want something more direction in your life because the chaos of the world is getting really unmanageable. So, you know, CoStar wasn't cutting it for me and I was trying all these different apps, inputting my birth time.
48:22 Speaker 00 Nothing seemed to be answering the questions I had. When I was in these moments of like, dear God, I need, I need something to tell me it's gonna be okay. So, uh, one day I was just on to the site astroseek.com and then I scrolled down, I went, oh, it has listed everything out so that you can copy paste the entire details of your birth chart into, uh, uh, ChatGPT. And then you can just have ChatGPT save your birth chart as a memory and then you can ask it whatever. So basically I have been asking ChatGPT stuff like, you know, I am planning this project.
49:03 Speaker 00 What transits of planets in the sky support me being successful? When am I supposed to manifest certain things? And like I said, I don't actually believe in all of this nonsense, but I am trying to make sense of a senseless world and I've actually found it kind of useful to, I don't know, just go to ChatGPT and ask my unhinged questions when I'm feeling just a little out of my mind and just need to be like brought down to earth a little bit. And, you know, at least I'm not using ChatGPT as a therapist. I have a real person for that. But yeah, I go to it with a bunch of different timing and astrology questions and go like, oh, thank you, ChatGPT. My Mercury is in the ninth house and in Aries and that does mean I am a direct communicator. Thank you.
49:48 Speaker 00 So very silly placebo type things. Uh, I probably just confessed to all of you that I'm neurotic as hell and I'm using AI for a very, very silly purpose. But hey, I've downloaded every AI powered astrology app at some point during the past five years. Do I think this is a particularly healthy coping mechanism? No, absolutely not, but it is what it is and it's, I don't know, it's working for me. So that's what I've been using AI for. Don't at me that astrology is fake because I already know and agree with you. Just let me have this. Ms. Cleo isn't around anymore. Just let me have this, okay?
50:31 Speaker 00 So that's it for The Vergecast. Thanks to all of my colleagues who've joined me today. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, examples of how you use AI in your daily life, you can always email at us at [email protected] or keep calling the hotline 866-VERGE11. This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brendan Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, and Andrew Marino. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. See you next time.
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