I've used it once to suggest a specific term that I'm going to use in my comic. I was utterly incapable of formulating a conventional search query for a search engine so, after endlessly browsing various thesauri, in the end I resorted to asking perplexity ai. Still took a bit and I had to fight it to get it to understand what I was asking but I did eventually find a term that fits. Felt dirty afterwards. Does that count as "productive"?

The only other thing was the title of a book I read 30 years ago and had only vague memory of. So I gave it an approximate description including a plot point I thought I remembered. The first result it gave me wasn't it. But it claimed the plot involved the thing I remembered. I then asked again and the second result actually was the correct book - turns out I had almost completely misremembered the plot point but it still said "yep, this happens in this book". Very weird experience.

I work in maintenance. I’ve looked some stuff up.

Its great for reading docs, I don't have to search through to find out how to get a user's playlists using the Spotify api

My physics professor has us compare our answers to physics problems with a LLM's output. Somehow, the AI is even worse at physics then I am, it once simplified (4pi2) to 4.

Copilot makes for a great autocomplete while programming. Saves me a ton of typing.

GitHub Copilot for fancy find and replace at work (rewriting a database migration from the old schema to the new schema). I pasted in the old migration, started the pattern and the AI finished for me.

I mainly use it to get a general direction/names/sources when I want to learn about someting but don't know where to start. So far it's the only use case for which I've found it reliably useful.