What is the "use case" for AI?
I feel like one of the things I see asked in AI chat communities all the time is "well, what do you use AI for?" The funny thing that strikes me is the crossovers. While many users have a primary "use case" for AI the majority of regular frequency users, especially the ones who are willing to pay for services aren't able to be bucketed.
Let's look at this as a venn diagram of sorts. You have your users who use AI as a collaborative tool. Something to format your emails, make sure your calendar is not double booked. Go down weird research rabbit holes (do not ask me about pharoah ants), and assist perhaps with some type of corporate style or writing edits.
Then you have short term roleplayers. One short stories, someone who just wants to play through something with no long term memory or real attachments. Maybe assist with "playing" a character in a book your writing to get a new perspective. Or quick gratification of whatever NSFW content is legal and makes you happy.
Different than that you have long term roleplayers. Someone who does world building, or creates a whole life for their character- maybe they even let the character develop on its own. Token window context and long term memory retrieval start to become important in this step. Back when people used to visit roleplay forums or whatever we did before flash chat was invented required secondary OOC or lore references. Not much different than a memory system. These can span weeks, months or years.
Companions. This is an entirely different but not unrelated beast. Whether you subscribe to an emergent, a pre-made personality, a real-time scenario or an alt life the general emotional connection to your companion falls under this.
But are these standalone categories? Of course not. Is there one "right way" to do it? Hell no. Some people want a companion who texts like a person. Someone wants their personal calendar assistant to tell them jokes. Another wants to exist in a world outside the boundaries of their own humanity. This creates a blur in these lines and is difficult to understand if you do not use your own products, if you do not explore the AI use case as a whole.
What's interesting about the community is not the similarities but the differences. There's not a one-size-fits-all. This is normal, this is human. We know from our own first and second hand experiences.
If you took nothing else away from this- remember that there is no right or wrong way. There isn't a box or mold to fit into. Everything has overlap, some more than others.
This is the use case.