For a few months now, the words about ChatGPT, a large language model developed by OpenAI, have been spattering all over the Internet. All the while, people have been playing around with the magic text box at the bottom of the page discovering as many capabilities as possible. We took a deep dive into all the threads around here and picked up the most commonly used options. And it seems, there’s still a lot of pulp to be squeezed out of this powerful engine. The only advice about using the chatbot we would give you is to take everything you get from it with a grain of salt and always check the output.
Learning and Tutoring
Teachers have real concerns about the future of education: professors are catching students handing in AI-written essays as their own, and institutions are increasingly banning ChatGPT on school devices. Still, some argue that large language models won’t be willed away and that teachers should consider how to use them and benefit from the technology (which basically means reinventing the way they used to teach). Erik Brynjolfsson, professor of economics and information technology at Stanford University, sees ChatGPT as a ‘calculator for writing’. Here are some examples of how ChatGPT can help you learn (and teach) faster and more effectively without cheating.
Explaining
ChatGPT can provide you with a comprehensive and simple explanation of whatever you want it to be: a theorem, a philosophical idea, or photosynthesis.
2. Have personal tutoring
— Syed Huq 🎮 (@thesyedhuq) January 3, 2023
ChatGPT can help you like a tutor with unlimited patience.
Ask it to explain math problems step by step, give you a lesson in history, or how you can strengthen an argument in your essay.
Better yet, plan and go through a study session with it. pic.twitter.com/9wGfM1tNYk
Writing Assistance
We definitely do not recommend that students cheat by turning in assignments that were generated by AI. But asking ChatGPT for help with research, spell-checking, and improvements doesn’t seem to be anything illegal. On top of that, Paul Graham, one of the co-founders of Y Combinator, came up with the idea of testing out essay topics with ChatGPT.
Idea: Before writing an essay, have ChatGPT write one on the same topic to show you what would be the conventional thing to say, so you can avoid saying that.
— Paul Graham (@paulg) January 26, 2023
REVIEWING
After you have written an essay, you can ask it for carrying out a review or suggesting ideas on how to strengthen your arguments.
2/ Study partner
— Joe Speiser ⚡️ (@jspeiser) January 2, 2023
Type “learn”
Then paste a link to your online textbook (or individual chapters).
Ask Chatbot to provide questions based on your textbook.
Boom.
Now you have a virtual study buddy. pic.twitter.com/q8ZtVitdKI
It is not only students who can benefit from using ChatGPT, but teachers as well. Peter Greene, a teacher, recommends that his colleagues feed their essay prompts to the chatbot before giving them to students.
“If it can come up with an essay that you would consider a good piece of work, then that prompt should be refined, reworked, or simply scrapped”, he said in his article on Forbes.
Greene explained that algorithmically constructed essay writing should be dead and replaced by a principle where ideas, thoughts, and what you want your essay to say are the basic building block of the text. So if crafting a solid, detailed prompt for the chatbot requires a lot of effort from students, “would that not mean that they were doing something involving real learning?” – Greene asks.
Coding Assistance
The discussion about how well ChatGPT writes code is controversial. Some people are dazzled, some are shocked, and some are terrified. There are those who are skeptical. Sometimes AI-generated code looks like a good one, but in fact, it can often be wrong. That’s the reason why Stack Overflow temporarily banned AI answers on its platform last month facing the influx of content that needed to be thoroughly reviewed by moderators. However, AI can be a good mate that handles some aspects of coding that require human oversight.
Writing and debugging Code
ChatGPT is able to perfectly nail a lot of technical tasks from fixing bugs, simplifying, translating, or improving your code to creating WordPress plugins, assisting in game development, or building a virtual machine right inside the chat.
Open AI’s ChatGPT can generate an entire WordPress plugin based on a simple description.
— Johnathon Williams (@johnofhousejohn) December 6, 2022
Watch it work: pic.twitter.com/LZQbxFq0aP
Explaining Code
And vice versa: send the chatbot a piece of code and ask it to explain what it does.
1. Explaining code
— Santiago (@svpino) January 6, 2023
Take some code you want to understand and ask ChatGPT to explain it.
I’ve found explanations are very detailed. This is much quicker than trying to figure out convoluted code.
2 of 16 pic.twitter.com/j1GYfi0hJz
Writing Documentation
One of the most time-consuming tasks a developer faces, and one that takes them away from coding, is writing code documentation. AI can ease the burden of development and let you focus on the creative part of your work.
9. Writing documentation
— Santiago (@svpino) January 6, 2023
This is another one of my favorite tricks.
Ask ChatGPT to write the documentation for a piece of code, and it usually does a great job.
It even includes usage examples as part of the documentation!
10 of 16 pic.twitter.com/G8HkG6k2BW
Content Creating and Marketing Assistance
The idea making the rounds on Twitter is “AI won’t replace humans. A human using AI will”. Along with this one: “Pretty much every smart person I know has a ChatGPT tab open while they work now. Amazing how fast that happened”. ChatGPT has already become a must-have tool for anyone who work with texts. Here’s what it does.
Brainstorm and Research Assistance
In one of our previous articles, we carried out an experiment using ChatGPT to create a marketing campaign. It showed that the algorithm can perform marketing tasks very well. If you provide detailed input, it will come up with good ideas. After you get the results, you need to consider reviewing, examining, and polishing them. It also works as well for a brainstorming session – ask the chatbot to share ideas for your blog posts or think of ways to solve a problem.
As mentioned in the section on education, ChatGPT is a great tool for providing feedback and giving ideas on how to improve a student’s essay. Content creators can also add this feature to their professional toolkits. Ask the chatbot to enrich your content with facts and statistics. This will be a great way to support your argument and add depth to your points. Don’t forget to fact-check – AI is prone to making things up.
writing Assistance
AI has shown an impressive ability to create plausible text – from fairytales to blog posts, marketing copies, and emails (check out this ironic, but fair representation of what the future of email would be like). While some news sites have already used AI to write articles (and some of them have stopped doing so), we wouldn’t say that ChatGPT is a tool that writers can completely rely on. It still has limitations and biases and sometimes provides incorrect answers that should be fact-checked before use.
However, when it comes to assisting in stringing words together, it does a good job. It can help you choose the right word, rephrase a statement in a more sophisticated way, or suggest a phrase that fits your tone.
Proofreading
Finally, ask ChatGPT to correct grammar, spelling and punctuation mistakes in your writing piece. It also can also provide an explanation of the changes it has made.
Productivity and Personal Assistance
Summarizing
If you send ChatGPT a piece of text, a long article, or a book, and ask it to summarize it, it will extract the main points and save you a lot of time. What’s more, some users have gone even further and opened up an ability to create a summary of meetings. Good news for those who can’t stand spending hours writing endless meeting reports.
Can ChatGPT create summaries of meetings?
— Panos Ipeirotis (@ipeirotis) December 16, 2022
I took 15 minutes of online office hours, downloaded the audio, ran it through Google Speech-to-Text, and then asked ChatGPT to summarize.
Look at the horrible transcript. Then look at the summary.
I am speechless. pic.twitter.com/VOOHZ19z6g
Translation
ChatGPT is able to understand and write English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Chinese and many more. However, proficiency may vary – it depends on the amount of text data that was used for training. As the chatbot itself admits, its ‘translations capabilities are not as good as professional translator or specialized tools’, but it can handle simple phrases.
Making Tables
It seems hidden in plain sight, but ChatGPT can create tables of data using HTML and CSS. Even though it doesn’t work in the same way as a spreadsheet program, it can still be useful if you need to organize some information.
6/ Making tables
— Alex Banks (@thealexbanks) January 6, 2023
As well as code, ChatGPT has the ability to produce information as a table.
Let’s find the tallest mountains in the world and their height. pic.twitter.com/tL4XCP2SLn
Searching
Despite sometimes being biased, offering information that may be inaccurate, and having other limitations, this cutting-edge technology is considered a real threat to Google’s dominance in the search engine market. In addition, there is a lot of concern for Q&A sites such as Quora, StackOverflow, and others. ChatGPT is good enough to give short and clear answers to questions that would be buried under a ton of ads, irrelevant information, and junk websites if you googled them.
Business Counselling
ChatGPT can be ‘hired’ as a business consultant. Here are some tricks for using ChatGPT to make decisions that will help grow your business or reduce the necessary but daunting routine before you hire a lawyer and business consultant.
Generating Legal Templates
The Chinese government plans to leverage AI to support and enhance its legal services by 2025. Why wouldn’t entrepreneurs use AI to improve the legal aspects of their businesses? It can craft legal templates such as Terms and Conditions, Privacy Policies, Non-Disclosure Agreements, Employment Contracts, and more.
5/ Generate legal templates
— Alex Banks (@thealexbanks) January 6, 2023
You can generate the structure for a privacy policy to your website.
Whilst you might not use the document in its entirety, ChatGPT does the heavy lifting for you. pic.twitter.com/gMMUlJJuzN
Consulting
There are companies out there that have already been testing chatbots in the business consulting space. Amazon employees have found ChatGPT to be ‘very strong’ on corporate strategy questions, Business Insider reported.
Health and Wellbeing
AI can serve as an assistant to help you maintain your routine, from organizing a party to scheduling a workout or providing first aid advice. Here are some examples of what you can ask it to do.
First Aid
Googling symptoms is not a good idea, nor is asking ChatGPT to diagnose diseases based on a text prompt describing your condition. But when it comes to first aid, both Google and ChatGPT can be helpful, with some limitations.
I’m testing out healthcare scenarios on the new OpenAI chatbot and am impressed so far. Seems like this could have potential as a medical chatbot, but obviously need to check for biases and misinformation. #NeurIPS #NeurIPS2022 pic.twitter.com/mBQPIsrclf
— Roxana Daneshjou MD/PhD (@RoxanaDaneshjou) December 1, 2022
While the first one, in fact, sends you to websites and forums, the second one contains warnings, emphasizes the importance of calling an ambulance, and gives a short step-by-step guide to follow before medical help arrives. Google offers you many resources, and you decide who you trust and where you go for help. ChatGPT is straightforward and fast, but the thing is, there is always the possibility of misinformation. Well, the choice is kind of being caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, but still better than nothing.
Wellbeing
As your personal health coach, ChatGPT can help you with a wide range of tasks, from creating a weight loss and workout plan to creating a meal plan and a grocery list. It can also provide you with recipes according to your meal plan.
I mean this sincerely when I say that ChatGPT might be the most incredible tech to emerge in the last decade.
— Alex Cohen (@anothercohen) December 4, 2022
Here’s how I got it to create a weight loss plan, complete with calorie targets, meal plans, a grocery list, and workout plan 🧵:
The list tends to be a bit messy: pairing coding and healthcare, business domains and cognitive techniques – it’s like chalk and cheese. But it shows just how infinite AI’s horizons are yet to expand.