AI Was Actually Useful for Organizing My Flight Info

I've struggled to find much use for AI. It's not that I'm not motivated—it's my job to try out new technology and point out useful ways to use it—but I rarely, if ever, stumble upon something the AI can do that I can't do faster and/or better with some other tool.

Until now.

I recently took a long trip that involved multiple flights and I wanted to add those flights to my calendar. I was annoyed to discover the airline didn't offer a button for doing this, or even an iCal download—all I got was a list of the flight times. So I thought I'd try AI.

I copied the times into Claude, which is an AI tool similar to ChatGPT. I asked the bot to convert the dates into an iCal file, and it worked. All I had to do was download the text file it offered, change the file name extension to "ics", and add it to my calendar. It worked perfectly: the times were even converted to account for the time zone differences at all locations.

Now, not every AI seems to work for this. I tested using ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Claude. Gemini gave me a tutorial about how to create an iCal file, which wasn't what I wanted; ChatGPT gave me a tutorial with a partial iCal download that was missing most of the events. It's possible I could get better results by adjusting my prompt, but with Claude I didn't have to: it gave me a perfectly formatted iCal file complete with a download button. All I had to do was rename the file extension after downloading and I could open it in the Calendar app on my Mac.

This, I think, might be my ideal use for AI: taking unstructured text data and converting it into an actual file. The iCal thing works an any context where someone gives you a list of dates and times—just copy that and ask your favorite bot to create an iCal file.

This isn't just for calendar appointments: you can make most any kind of file, assuming you have the right kind of data. For example: I copied some numbers from Wikipedia and asked Claude to turn it into a CSV file—it worked.

Credit: Justin Pot

Basically, if there's data you want organized in a particular file type, Claude seems like a good solution. Now, there's a a catch here. The free version of Claude will complain if you paste in a large dataset and possibly stop partway through the conversion. If you're a paying customer, though, it should power through.

Again, I'm not really an AI guy, but this I find useful. Give Claude a try the next time you have to turn a messy assortment of text into an actual file—it just might work.