With the summer officially upon us, I thought I would take a minute to share how I’ve been using AI in my personal life to make it a little bit easier. After all, if your life is easier, you can perform better in your job – and hence, be a better disclosure draftsperson.
Here are five of the ways:
- Enjoying Therapy and Other Self-Help – I had heard that folks were using AI as a therapist so I gave it a go to see how effective it was. And boy, oh, boy, it is effective. Truly amazing. It gave me ideas on how to handle certain stories I tell myself that I hadn’t contemplated before. So it was better than any therapist I’ve ever had. Granted, I’ve always had bad luck with therapists but still.
Then my wife and I tried it as a couples counselor for grins and it wound up helping us in ways I didn’t expect. So it’s really worth checking out. Plus, it’s free! And you can get an appointment anytime! And you have a transcript of your session so you can go back and refer to it anytime. In fact, the AI offered to concoct a one-pager list of all the self-help instructions it came up with – so I have printed that out to refer to anytime. And you can do meditation, hypnosis and what-not with AI too.
I’ve even created a custom GPT of my favorite mindfulness practitioner and I can talk to that person now anytime I want. As I mention below, using voice with AI is a total game-changer and these self-help exercises are a prime example of how voice can be used for maximum effect. - Creating Cool Images – This is mind-blowing too. You can talk to AI and come up with any type of image you want within seconds. Including logos – such as the logo for my “reggae band” that I discuss below. Or my silly idea for AI to create an image of a lawyer in Manhattan carrying a BlackBerry while eating a hot dog, which is the image above. Or to create a comic strip, which I have been doing nearly daily based on things that happen in my life, see an example below of me and my wife.
If you’re selling something online, you can upload an image of it and ask AI to draft you a description of it. If you have an image with numbers in it, you can ask AI to extract the numbers so you can dump them in an Excel spreadsheet or have AI summarize the numbers or point out key observations. - Getting Financial (Shopping & Other) Advice – As I get older, I notice sometimes the small talk among individuals is getting ideas for TV shows folks are watching lately. The beauty of AI is that if you turn the “memory” on so that the AI that you use regularly – whether it be ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc. – gets to know your preferences and it can then make recommendations based on you.
Along those lines, I find myself turning to AI to ask it many things that I normally would rely on my fellow humans for when it comes to recommending something or someone. I’ve also heard many stories of AI properly diagnosing a medical condition where doctors have failed. Mindblowing.
And yes, you can even upload any type of agreement and ask it to review it for any red flags or to summarize it. You can’t let AI be a substitute for the experts you should be hiring for all these types of things. But it can help you analyze whether your experts have missed anything. - Analyzing My “Big Ideas” – I’m an “idea guy” and many of those are bad ideas. I use AI as a sounding board to help determine how bad they might be – and whether there might be ways to improve those ideas. Or is that idea one of those that belong on the scrap heap.
So you can easily brainstorm with AI as your chat buddy by using the voice features and just talk with AI. Using voice with AI is a game-changer. It’s a lot different than using Siri on your iPhone or Alexa on your Amazon devices. It really does feel like you’re talking to a confidant as you can have a real conversation (that feels safe).
You can even ask it to only respond to you when you call it by it’s name. To do that, first you tell the AI what name you’ll be calling it – for example, “I will call you Mary” – and then you ask it to only respond when you ask it a question that begins with “Mary.” - Making Reggae Music – I love music but I don’t play an instrument. But with AI – specifically an AI platform called “Suno.” With AI, I can play any instrument and sing for any genre you can think of, including genres that don’t exist yet, with the push of a button.
And I have a reggae album on Spotify under the band name “Coconut Sun.” It sounds amazing. Truly. And each song on average took me about 20 minutes to make. Here is one of my songs if you don’t have Spotify…
