I’ve used chat gpt a few times for lesson planning (pretty good!)but not really anything else. Just listened to one of my flower farmer podcasts and she was talking about using it to help with boring planning / administrative tasks but also about all the issues. One comment was that she decided fr ethical reasons to use Claude.
If you use AI what one do you use and why? Also have you tried others and if yes why did you discount them?
I’ve been using Google Gemini.
I don’t see it as an ethical choice (apart from eschewing Grok): do you know what your flower farmer colleague meant?
I use Copilot simply because it gives you more free time before you have to pay.
I use what was Le Chat because it’s French. But now called Vibe, which is so horrid I might have to give it up!
Le Chat (Vibe) by Mistral AI is a high-quality European alternative to ChatGPT . With this super-fast AI assistant, you’re in the right place in terms of privacy, as your data is not passed on to other companies. Mistral AI also pursues sustainability, through a European data center that runs on green energy
Have you tried asking ChatGPT which is the best AI? 
Depends what you want it for perhaps? eg more creative input or organisation
It depends. For vibe coding I find Claude is way better than the others so tend to use that the most.
I do use ChatGPT too, because we have access to the Entreprise version at work (where what you feed it doesn’t then get used to train it for others) but I don’t particularly like Sam Altmann… He gives me Zuckerberg vibes. Maybe they’re both robots from the future.
I’ve also been playing around with my own locally hosted version. Qwen is pretty good for that.
I also use Mistral Vibe (formerly Le Chat). And Qwant as search engine.
NONE. AI bothers me because it’s so polished; it lacks—and will always lack—the whimsy, the extravagance, the quirkiness, the unpredictability and the capacity for error that make human interaction so charming.
Me too, though I do use some Ai within photo editing software such as Photoshop.
It’s also not always reliable, and a fair bit of it is based on intellectual property theft (scraping info off the internet) which does not sit well with me ethically.
Ethically speaking: intellectual property, of course, but also the environmental cost (global warming, water use, etc.) So I’m all for using it for the sake of progress (medicine, etc.), but not for looking up a clafoutis recipe or videos of cute cats 
*and the exploitation of clickworkers…
Good point!
Claude has surpassed Gemini in helping me get the swimming pool from green to clear once more 
Looks like tech capital Seattle is going to put a moratorium on new data centres because of their impact on the local environment, electricity demands and local tech jobs.
Meanwhile, Cape Town (which has longstanding water and elec supply problems) is going ahead with a data centre on the Cape Flats, a huge ‘informal settlement’ (shanty town) that will consume approx a third of the city’s electricity.
I tend to disagree Juliet, I believe the vast benefits resulting from AI outweigh the significant ecological problems that need solving (perhaps with the help of AI?)
Seemingly trivial use by people who ask for cute cat videos, means they are learning how to use this relatively new technology and they may well go on to help solve some of the world’s problems.
Cute videos is my cat’s main income stream.
Think that’s a tad over-optimistic!
I use copilot for work, because it’s supposed to have been set up to prevent leakage of confidential data. The company I consult for prefers Claude. Both have provided useful scientific insights, and both also flawed and sometimes contradictory results, even within the some session.
The environmental issues also scare me. The podcast I was listening to was a regenerative flower farmer so obviously super aware of and caring about the environmental problems. She made the point that if those of us that DO care aren’t involved / at the conversation table in a meaningful way (as in have experience and know what we are talking about) it will make it harder to come to the table further down the line regarding AI. It has made me think anyway.
Thanks for your thoughts, think I might give Claude a go, I like his name
You only had to ask a real person. The real genius is not letting it get green in the first place.