4 ways you can use ChatGPT to improve your day to day life

AI may have, to date, helped businesses predict consumer behaviour, improved marketing campaigns and meant I’ve been engaging with chatbots rather than real people when using customer service. However, in the words of Shania Twain, ‘That don’t impress me much’. As well as that, the real, consumer facing, breakthrough technologies, like self-driving cars, turn out to be a whole lot more complicated than previously thought. But, this week, a little AI bot called ChatGPT has gone viral and it’s really impressive.

ChatGPT is a prototype artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI which specialises in language and dialogue. I’ve been messing about with it constantly and here are 4 things I think it’s pretty great at.

1. Getting over writers block: It isn’t connected to the internet so can’t use up to date stats or evidence but it can write essays on any topic — like ‘What are the drivers of economic growth’ or ‘Tell a story about Pikachu eating a grapefruit’. On the more matter of fact questions, the answers don’t blow my mind — but nothing it said was wrong and just helped me move away from the blank page into writing mode and gave me something to build from.
2. Answers to questions: It actually answers questions in a helpful way. I feel like Google has regressed so much in the last 5 years as a search engine — most of the time when I want to search for something or generate ideas, I end up typing ‘Reddit’ at the end for suggestions because Google’s responses are now just so poor. The top articles just tend to be Ad-Revenue generating now rather than anything aimed at answering your question. Without the same incentives, ChatGPT actually offers useful suggestions and answers to questions you throw at it — like present ideas, or ways to fix things around the house.*
3. TL;DR: It can summarise information you don’t have time and/or can’t be bothered to read — like this blog. If you type TL;DR at the start and paste in what you want summarised and it will read what you’ve pasted and summarise it for you! It’s amazingly helpful when you’re in a rush.
4. Writing and quality assuring code/excel formulas etc.: If you give it the right specs and information, it can write code or complex excel formulas for you. I’ve only used it to check work I have already done so far but it’s been really handy.

*Edit: I have since read that it is fundamentally giving wrong answers to non basic maths problems. This is driven by the fact that it’s not actually doing the work and answering it but instead using learned behaviour and what it knows from the internet to answer the question rather than actual doing the arithmetic. Best to stick to language for now it seems.

I do highly recommend you ask it to write a satrical day in the life of your job.

It definitely isn’t perfect. Sometimes with really in depth questions, it errs on the side of simple, or if you ask it very similar questions it gives similar answers — exposing some of the flaws in its critical thinking ability.

Sadly, it’s also been overwhelmed by its own popularity and recently most of the time i’ve tried to access it, it has been at capacity. I would really recommend a try though — there are so many uses for your work and personal life, it might take a while to find them but once you do it could be game changing.

I am excited to see that it has wide ranging access, without needing specialist software or being an academic to access. There is, of course, a dark side around plagiarism and impacts on bloggers/artists etc. For example, for teachers where students may use it to answer homework. This is going to create a whole new world of challenges that need adapting too but I am optimistic.

Finally, a bit of a shout-out to DALL·E, which is an AI system that can create realistic synthetic images/art from any description. The picture above is ‘A man running from an AI robot on the moon’.

Have a good week!

Shiv

Links:

ChatGPT: https://chat.openai.com/auth/login

Dalle: https://openai.com/dall-e-2/