No, it’s not just a search engine. No, it won’t give you factual answers to all your questions. And yes, it is more than just a way to generate amusing poems or stories about your pet.
Despite all the publicity around AI – and especially ChatGPT – there are still plenty of misconceptions around how best to use it. And this is compounded by the fact that things are developing so quickly.
In fact by the time I’ve finished this paragraph, the below might already be out of date!
One source of confusion is that ChatGPT is both simple – and full of infinite possibilities – at the same time. So when somebody encounters a lone text box with the ability to input anything without guardrails, it’s often difficult to know where to start and how to get the most out of it.
Google is something we can all grasp because it involves getting information via very specific keywords. You know what it can and can’t do and there’s an inherent understanding of its limitations.
But with ChatGPT, you have to talk to the damn thing.
So here’s a very brief primer for anyone who’s new to ChatGPT. This literally just scratches the surface, but for a new user it covers a few high-level themes to hopefully put you on the road to prompt proficiency.
ChatGPT is Not Always a Reliable Source of Answers
The simplest way to think about this is to understand ChatGPT has been programmed to output content, not output facts.
Now on many occasions it can and does generate facts that are quite useful – but it’s important to understand that it isn’t always a reliable purveyor of the truth. As with a politician, anything ChatGPT tells you shouldn’t be blindly accepted.
You may have heard that ChatGPT can “hallucinate” information – i.e. it will often just make things up. This may seem like a flaw or bug if you view ChatGPT through the lens of being a knowledge resource. But that’s the wrong way to look at it.
Firstly, ChatGPT isn’t trained on the most up-to-date information on the Web. At the time of writing, the extent of its knowledge only goes up to October 2023 and then stops….so it’s 12 months behind the rest of us.
Secondly, ChatGPT was never designed to be a purely fact-based knowledge engine. The real value is its ability to create, analyze, and look for patterns in content, as opposed to simply parroting facts.
So to get the most out of ChatGPT, think of it as a tool that can help you generate ideas, organize your existing ideas, or filter through large amounts of data that would be incredibly onerous for a person to do.
Having said all of that, OpenAI recently launched its own Google competitor – a Web search feature that you can access directly in the main ChatGPT interface. Simply click on the circle with the criss-crossing lines within the main prompt field and you can toggle into search mode.
This returns a more traditional – but enhanced Web search – which includes an AI-generated summary, along with links to specific websites that you can visit for more information.
This feature is currently only available to paid-subscribers and there’s no word yet on if the AI-generated summaries are still prone to hallucinations (my experience has been pretty good so far), but this is clearly an area to watch as OpenAI pushes further into search.
Tell It What It Is
When you first use ChatGPT the instinct is to simply ask it to do something. And in many cases that can be effective.
But a far more powerful approach is to tell ChatGPT what it is – or how it should act – before you give it an instruction. By doing this, you can generate a whole series of nuanced perspectives that help increase your understanding of a topic.
Here’s a fairly simple example. Let’s say you were interested in how AI is going to develop and impact life in the future. You could just ask ChatGPT this question and you’d likely get a perfectly acceptable and interesting answer.
Now consider the same question, but tell ChatGPT to act with a degree of nuance. So an alternative question might be:
“Act as a technology expert who is deeply skeptical about the societal impact of AI. How do you see AI developing in the future?”
or
“Act as technology expert who is deeply optimistic about how AI can change society. How do you see AI developing in the future?”
So by telling ChatGPT what it is, you can get a variety of perspectives on the same question or problem.
Tell it Who You Are
The same rule applies for the audience you want ChatGPT to tailor its output to.
By telling it who it should write its response for, you’ll get a much more precise answer.
So using our example above, one such prompt could be:
“Act as a technology expert who is deeply skeptical of AI. How do you see AI developing in the future? Your answer should be written for an 11-year-old who has limited-to-no experience with AI and very little understanding of how large language models.”
By telling ChatGPT who its audience is, the voice, tone, and detail of its responses will change accordingly.
You can also tell it exactly how to deliver its answer by setting additional parameters around length (100 words, 1000 words, 5 paragraphs etc), around format (numbered bullets, simple paragraphs etc), and a whole host of other ways.
In short, it’ll give you the answer you need in a way you need it – but you have to tell it upfront!
Ask it to Improve Your Question
In many respects ChatGPT is more about questions than it is answers. That’s because it’s the quality and precision of your questions that will determine how useful its answers are.
Unless you’re a trained journalist (and this certainly doesn’t apply to all journalists), you may not be well-versed in asking or writing focused questions. Our questions can often be vague or too general and we don’t instinctively drill-down to intricate levels of detail.
One way around this is to ask ChatGPT to improve on your question. So it’ll take your question, generate a better one, and then answer the better question that it generated.
So for example, you might ask ChatGPT:
“How can I best lose 15lbs? Take my question and then ask me a better question so that you can generate the best answer.”
ChatGPT will then generate a more focused question that you can then ask it to answer, ensuring you get a well-targeted response.
This is a great feature because it allows you to see questions related to your overall problem that you didn’t think to ask. As mentioned above, ChatGPT can help you with generating new ideas by giving you a range of perspectives – and this is one way of doing just that.
Ask ChatGPT to Ask You Questions
This is a riff on the method above, but you can also instruct ChatGPT to ask you a series of questions to help it generate a better answer or solution.
So a great example of how this could work is as follows:
“Ask me questions, one-at-a-time, to help generate a fitness program for me. When you have enough answers, outline what the program looks like.”
ChatGPT will then ask you a series of questions about your goals and lifestyle to generate a fitness program personalized to you.
The important thing to note here is that – once again – the prompt/question I’m asking is extremely precise. The more granular and specific detail you include in your prompts, the more effective output you’ll get.
As I mentioned earlier, this post is just scratching the surface on how you can get the most out of ChatGPT. I’ll be writing more about this in subsequent posts, but if you’re interested in learning more I would strongly recommend this introductory course on Coursera given by Dr. Jules White from Vanderbilt University. It’s a great primer for anyone new to ChatGPT and will really help you get the most out of it.
Chat’s all, folks.