cheers, ChatGPT

I’m trying my best to use AI where I can, when I can. Continually, I find it less helpful as a writing tool and wish I could almost teach it how to write like me but with less grammar and spelling errors. It’s been solid for brainstorming but quickly gets repetitive and less useful. The last few weeks though I’ve found two very different and excellent use cases: interpreting MRI results and making a cocktail with very random ingredients I have.

I’m dealing with two herniated discs right now and got lost in the sea of disc bulge, disc herniation, etc. I decided to try prompting ChatGPT since I had four days to wait until I saw my ortho doc. It was brilliant. I had it explain what was going on at different lengths, different levels of expertise, and asked what the usual protocol is. I even went into a whole dive around how radiologists tend to describe herniations so I could understand my results at a deeper level. I asked ChatGPT what I should talk to my doctor about and got a few good question ideas. All of this left me very prepared for my 15 minute visit with a list of recent symptoms and questions on my phone that he simply ran through. Throughout the last week and a half, I keep returning to ChatGPT to learn more from different perspectives (“I’m a physical therapist trying to design a treatment for someone with XYZ disc herniation…”). All of it is making me a better and wiser patient.

Tonight, in more fun news, I wanted to make a cocktail with some of the disparate ingredients I had but didn’t have a clue where to start. I listed my ingredients and asked for a recommendation. My only replacement was to use some rosemary simple syrup I made instead of the honey syrup. I’m sipping it now — cheers, ChatGPT. Perhaps it’ll help me plan my next trip.