Meg Faibisch Kühn discovered ChatGPT a year ago and started using it every day at work.She then realized she could use the chatbot in her personal life too, for tasks like gardening. She pays $20 a month for ChatGPT Plus, saying it is worthwhile and helps her save time at home.

This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with Meg Faibisch Kühn, a 28-year-old digital marketer living in San Rafael, California, about the ways she uses AI in her daily life. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I came across ChatGPT a year ago. I started using it for my work as a digital marketer to write product descriptions, and I was blown away.

I pay $20 a month for ChatGPT Plus, which enables you to use GPT-4. It's absolutely worthwhile. I use it for four to five work-related tasks per day, including schedule planning, generating alt text for social-media posts, and writing emails in my voice.

It wasn't immediately obvious that ChatGPT was a tool for enhancing my personal life as well as my work.

I would run into issues at home and would often use TikTok to search for solutions, watching DIY or organizational hacks. I wasn't always finding the answers I wanted on TikTok, so I put them into ChatGPT.

I now use ChatGPT around twice per day outside work. I'm able to interact with it and work through my specific problems. It's vastly more helpful than search engines. It's saving me time and allowing me to address areas that I don't know how to approach.

Here are some of the ways I use it in my daily life outside work:

1. ChatGPT helped me use up the ingredients in my pantry and reduce waste

I love food, but I would dread coming up with meal ideas at the end of a long working day.

Using ChatGPT is like having an in-house recipe developer. I catalog the ingredients we have on hand, and it produces really creative recipes I wouldn't have thought of. The first recipe I tried was a shrimp laksa curry, which was absolutely delicious.

One tip: after putting in your prompt, say, "Ask me five clarifying questions to help improve your response."

In some cases, it doesn't ask any questions, but this time, it asked me questions like "Do I have any dietary preferences? Which meals did I want it to give me recipes for? Is it breakfast, lunch, or dinner? Do I have any cuisine preferences?"

ChatGPT's clarifying questions in response to Faibisch's prompt. Screenshot from ChatGPT/Courtesy of Meg Faibisch Kühn

I've found that this way, I can use my brain power to be more creative and concentrate on cooking the actual meal.

Mitigating food waste is really important to me. In my prompts, I'm explicit about using only the ingredients I give it. I say, "Here are the exact ingredients in my pantry. Please use only the ingredients in this list to create a meal plan."

Our pantry was overflowing with random ingredients, but now we've actually started using them up and clearing space.

2. ChatGPT helped me renovate my kitchen

My husband and I wanted to renovate our kitchen in the most cost-effective way possible. We did everything by ourselves.

When I had renovation questions, I would use YouTube, TikTok, or random blogs on the internet for tutorials and inspiration, but for other questions, I used ChatGPT.

I assigned it a specific role, telling it to "act as a general contractor."

We were painting a range hood, which goes above the oven. I wanted to lime wash it and ChatGPT gave me step-by-step instructions on how to achieve this.

Faibisch's conversation with ChatGPT about limewashing her range hood. Screenshot from ChatGPT/Courtesy of Meg Faibisch Kühn

I was able to use it to figure out how many tiles I needed for the floor. I gave it the dimensions of our floor and the tile I was using.

The calculations stumped me when I tried to do it myself because when you buy tiles, you need extra because you're going to make a lot of odd cuts. ChatGPT took all these into consideration and showed me the math of how it arrived at the answer.

Faibisch's conversation with ChatGPT about tiling her floor. Courtesy of Meg Faibisch Kühn 3. ChatGPT helps me decide which products to buy

For bigger financial decisions, I like to use ChatGPT as a sounding board to figure out what I should buy.

I have a nice DSLR camera I use to record YouTube videos, and I wanted to buy a microphone.

I didn't have time to scour through 50 different blog posts on microphones. Influencers were recommending products on YouTube, but I didn't know which one to trust because they all seemed motivated by making an affiliate commission for mentioning a certain product. ChatGPT did the legwork for me in scouring all the reviews to find the best opinion for the microphone.

Faibisch's conversation with ChatGPT about which microphone to buy. Screenshot from ChatGPT/Courtesy of Meg Faibisch Kühn

It likely is still pulling information from content that contains affiliate marketing on the internet but I do still find it useful. I know that if there were scathing, negative reviews of the product, ChatGPT would be able to identify those too.

I'm mindful that it's only trained on data up to April 2023, so I know it's not going to take into account any new products.

4. I've used a custom AI bot for gardening

Because I pay for ChatGPT Plus, I can create custom "GPTs" which are personalized chatbots that operate off of data you give, such as PDFs, as well as the data ChatGPT has already been trained on.

I made one called "Garden Guru." The US Department of Agriculture recently updated its map of the US with different plant hardiness zones marked on it. It shows how your plant is going to perform based on where you live.

Faibisch's conversation with her custom GPT "Garden Guru." Screenshot from ChatGPT/Courtesy of Meg Faibisch Kühn

I exported the map as a PDF and manually uploaded it to my custom GPT, so it's working off the most current information regarding plant hardiness zones.

I can ask it when to plant a certain seed based on where I live. I was able to create a calendar for different plants we wanted to have in our garden throughout the year.

I haven't found a resource like this on the internet. It's cut down the research I would need to do about my area.