If you're having trouble coming up with tasks for 'artificial intelligence too cheap to meter', it could be because you are having trouble coming up with tasks for intelligence period. Just because something is highly useful doesn't mean you can immediately make use of it in your current local optimum; you may need to seriously reorganize your life and workflows before any kind of intelligence could be useful.
There is a good post on the front page right now about exactly this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7L8ZwMJkhLXjSa7tD/the-great-data-integration-schlep Most of the examples in it do not actually depend on the details of 'AI' vs employee vs contractor vs API vs... - the organization is organized to defeat the improvement. It doesn't matter whether it's a data scientist or an AI reading the data if there is some employee whose career depends on that data not being read and who is sabotaging it, or some department defending its fief. (I usually call this concept "automation as colonization wave": many major technologies of undoubted enormous value, such as steam or the Internet or teleconferencing/remote-working, take a long time to have massive effects because you have everyone stuck in local optima and potentially outright sabotaging any integration of the Big New Thing, and potentially have to create entirely new organizations and painfully liquidate the old ones through decades of bleeding.) There are few valuable "AI-shaped holes" because we've organized everything to minimize the damage from lacking AI to fill those holes, as it were: if there were some sort of organization which had naturally large LLM-shaped holes where filling them would massively increase the organization's output... it would've gone extinct long ago and been replaced by ones with human-shaped holes instead, because humans were all you could get. (This is why LLM uses are pretty ridiculous right now as a % of GDP - oh wow, it can do a slightly better job of spellchecking my emails? I can have it write some code for me? Not exactly a new regime of hyperbolic global economic growth.)
So one thing you could try, if you are struggling to spend $1000/month usefully on artificial intelligence, is to instead experiment by committing to spend $1000/month on natural intelligence. That is, look into hiring a remote worker / assistant / secretary, an intern, or something else of that ilk. They are, by definition, a flexible multimodal generally-intelligent human-level neural net capable of tool use and agency, an 'ANI' if you will. (And if you mentally ignore that $1000/month because it's an experiment, you can treat it as 'natural intelligence too cheap to meter', just regarding it a sunk cost.) An outsourced human fills a very similar hole as an AI could, so it removes the distracting factor of AI and simply asks, 'are there any large, valuable, genuinely-moving-the-needle outsourced-human-shaped holes in your life?' There probably are not! Then it's no surprise if you can't plug the holes which don't exist with any AI, present or future.
(If this is still too confusing, you can try treating yourself as a remote worker and roleplay as them by sending yourself emails and trying to pretend you have amnesia as you write a reply and avoid doing anything a remote work could not do, like edit files on your computer, and charging yourself an appropriate hourly rate, terminating at $1000 cumulative.)
If you find you cannot make good use of your hired natural intelligent neural net, then that fully explains your difficulty of coming up with compelling usecases for artificially intelligent neural nets too. And if you do, you now have a clean set of things you can meaningfully try to do with AI services.
An analogous example might be the difficulties some people have in 'being rich' or 'becoming a manager/learning to delegate'. If you were poor or are used to doing everything yourself, it can be difficult to spend your new money well or make any good use of your secretary or junior employees; but one would not infer from that that "money is useless" or "staff is useless". It is simply that you need to figure out how to live your new life, and your old ways were adapted to your old life.
This can be surprisingly hard sometimes: there are many anecdotes of people who are destroyed by their newfound wealth or can't do anything but hoard it, or who run an organization into the ground because they are unable to delegate. Even the simpler forms are hard. (On the very rare occasion I stay at a luxury hotel/cruise ship or go to a fancy restaurant, where there is a lot of staff who are there to cater to your every whim, I struggle to come up with whims worth catering to, because having been raised middle-class and being used to staying in the cheapest hotels where waking up sans bed bugs is a minor victory, I mostly find anything like a 'servant' to be extremely alienating and stressful and don't know how to get anything out of it. I'm sure I could do so if this became an ordinary thing, but it would still take time - I don't just automatically know how to adjust!)
If you're having trouble coming up with tasks for 'artificial intelligence too cheap to meter', it could be because you are having trouble coming up with tasks for intelligence period. Just because something is highly useful doesn't mean you can immediately make use of it in your current local optimum; you may need to seriously reorganize your life and workflows before any kind of intelligence could be useful.
There is a good post on the front page right now about exactly this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7L8ZwMJkhLXjSa7tD/the-great-data-integration-schlep Most of the examples in it do not actually depend on the details of 'AI' vs employee vs contractor vs API vs... - the organization is organized to defeat the improvement. It doesn't matter whether it's a data scientist or an AI reading the data if there is some employee whose career depends on that data not being read and who is sabotaging it, or some department defending its fief. (I usually call this concept "automation as colonization wave": many major technologies of undoubted enormous value, such as steam or the Internet or teleconferencing/remote-working, take a long time to have massive effects because you have everyone stuck in local optima and potentially outright sabotaging any integration of the Big New Thing, and potentially have to create entirely new organizations and painfully liquidate the old ones through decades of bleeding.) There are few valuable "AI-shaped holes" because we've organized everything to minimize the damage from lacking AI to fill those holes, as it were: if there were some sort of organization which had naturally large LLM-shaped holes where filling them would massively increase the organization's output... it would've gone extinct long ago and been replaced by ones with human-shaped holes instead, because humans were all you could get. (This is why LLM uses are pretty ridiculous right now as a % of GDP - oh wow, it can do a slightly better job of spellchecking my emails? I can have it write some code for me? Not exactly a new regime of hyperbolic global economic growth.)
So one thing you could try, if you are struggling to spend $1000/month usefully on artificial intelligence, is to instead experiment by committing to spend $1000/month on natural intelligence. That is, look into hiring a remote worker / assistant / secretary, an intern, or something else of that ilk. They are, by definition, a flexible multimodal generally-intelligent human-level neural net capable of tool use and agency, an 'ANI' if you will. (And if you mentally ignore that $1000/month because it's an experiment, you can treat it as 'natural intelligence too cheap to meter', just regarding it a sunk cost.) An outsourced human fills a very similar hole as an AI could, so it removes the distracting factor of AI and simply asks, 'are there any large, valuable, genuinely-moving-the-needle outsourced-human-shaped holes in your life?' There probably are not! Then it's no surprise if you can't plug the holes which don't exist with any AI, present or future.
(If this is still too confusing, you can try treating yourself as a remote worker and roleplay as them by sending yourself emails and trying to pretend you have amnesia as you write a reply and avoid doing anything a remote work could not do, like edit files on your computer, and charging yourself an appropriate hourly rate, terminating at $1000 cumulative.)
If you find you cannot make good use of your hired natural intelligent neural net, then that fully explains your difficulty of coming up with compelling usecases for artificially intelligent neural nets too. And if you do, you now have a clean set of things you can meaningfully try to do with AI services.
An analogous example might be the difficulties some people have in 'being rich' or 'becoming a manager/learning to delegate'. If you were poor or are used to doing everything yourself, it can be difficult to spend your new money well or make any good use of your secretary or junior employees; but one would not infer from that that "money is useless" or "staff is useless". It is simply that you need to figure out how to live your new life, and your old ways were adapted to your old life.
This can be surprisingly hard sometimes: there are many anecdotes of people who are destroyed by their newfound wealth or can't do anything but hoard it, or who run an organization into the ground because they are unable to delegate. Even the simpler forms are hard. (On the very rare occasion I stay at a luxury hotel/cruise ship or go to a fancy restaurant, where there is a lot of staff who are there to cater to your every whim, I struggle to come up with whims worth catering to, because having been raised middle-class and being used to staying in the cheapest hotels where waking up sans bed bugs is a minor victory, I mostly find anything like a 'servant' to be extremely alienating and stressful and don't know how to get anything out of it. I'm sure I could do so if this became an ordinary thing, but it would still take time - I don't just automatically know how to adjust!)
I enjoyed reading this, highlights were part on reorganization of the entire workflow, as well as the linked mini-essay on cats biting due to prey drive.