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How to use AI for family time

    As always, to play it safe, double check the recipes to make sure your bot isn’t hallucinating.

    Let’s move on to gift giving – a talent some of us possess more than others. There are several AI tools that should make gift selection easier, including a website that comes up with gift ideas based on someone’s Instagram profile.

    I preferred DreamGift, which uses a chatbot to ask you a series of questions about the gift recipient’s age, gender, interests, and hobbies, along with how much you’re willing to spend, and automatically generates ideas and links to order the items online. (My wife confessed that she liked some of the bot’s gift suggestions, including an indoor herb growing kit, more than some of the gifts I’d given her over the years. Ouch.)

    If you prefer to use a chatbot, that works too. Connected to search engines, Bing and Bard are powerful shopping assistants. The trick to getting tailored recommendations is sharing voluminous details about your budget and the people you’re shopping for.

    Let’s finish with something more creative. You can use AI to create a custom bedtime story or even your own paper children’s book.

    Give a chatbot like ChatGPT or Bard a detailed prompt that includes your child’s storytelling style, any details you want to include, and the situation you want the story to address. Here is a prompt I wrote for a hypothetical child who is unhappy about moving into a new home. I asked it to involve some familiar characters:

    Act as a writer of children’s books and imitate “Frog and Toad”. My child is going through a difficult time – we are moving to a new house and changing schools. Write a story to help him process that. Use our dogs, Max and Mochi the corgis, as characters.

    The chatbot generated a heartfelt story about Max and Mochi, a pair of furry siblings. They loved to play in the park and were sad to move to a new home. But they supported each other and eventually went to a new school, where they made new friends: Bella the cheerful Beagle and Charlie the cheeky Chihuahua. Everything worked out in the end.