Do’s and Don’ts of using ChatGPT in your daily life

My colleague Will Oremus spent months trying, failing, and then trying again to use ChatGPT to help him summarize information, brainstorm, and write.

Try it out for yourself and see what happens when you apply some chatbot tweaks, such as giving ChatGPT personal information about your friends to draft wedding greetings.

Will said an important lesson he learned from his research and experimentation was to change (or lower) our expectations for AI chatbots.

ChatGPT is not like a Magic Ball 8 that gives the perfect answer but like a tireless but not very smart brainstorming partner.

I spoke with Will to determine the do’s and don’ts so you can get the most out of AI chatbots.

Don’t use chatbots for actual answers

Google and Wikipedia aren’t perfect, but they’re good enough to provide reliable factual information in most cases.

“That’s not what we’re talking about with chatbots at this stage,” Will said. “We are talking about a series of questions that AI will seriously misunderstand.”

Paraphrasing programmer Simon Willison, Will said AI chatbots give you an average or typical response from the information the software has absorbed from millions of websites. That average can be right – or wildly wrong.

And if the chatbot doesn’t know the answer to the question “What is Shira Ovide’s favorite food?” it might invent a reasonable-sounding answer.

For questions with known answers — the height of the Washington Monument or the biography of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz — use Google or Wikipedia, not ChatGPT.

Use chatbots to help you brainstorm

When Will was planning his kid’s 8th birthday party, he entered ChatGPT for help with the invitation — but not to write a draft.

Will knows that the AI ​​has collected a lot of kids party invitations from the internet. He wanted to see what those party parents did in the past.

One of the invites suggested by ChatGPT reads like, come to the party, there will be games, cakes and prizes. “And I thought, ‘Do they give awards to birthday parties?’” Will said. (Yes, they do.)

Will said because the chatbot has a huge archive of people’s past posts online, he started using ChatGPT to find out what other people have done in the past for parties, planning soccer practice and more.

Don’t ask the chatbot once and then stop

Chatbot experts know that the first response when you type is “How can I talk to my 8-year-old to convince him to brush his teeth?” can be generic and not useful.

But Will said if you keep going back and forth, ChatGPT might find something that sparks the idea.

“You never sit down and expect to type in your prompt, get a response, and that’s it,” says Will. “It should always be seen as an iterative process.”

When I asked kids to brush their teeth, the free, public version of ChatGPT offered 12 suggestions. One of them is to tell your child a funny story about a “tooth superhero” who uses a toothbrush to defeat monsters.

I typed in a follow-up question: “What story can I tell about superhero teeth?”

The chatbot’s subsequent responses suggest a character named “Flora the Flosser”. They’re not great, but they’re not bad.

I turned around and asked ChatGPT to do a story about a unicorn. The software responds to “Rinsewind the Rainbow Rinser,” a unicorn whose rainbow mouthwash is a protective tooth shield.

ChatGPT can suggest tons of (mostly terrible) ideas. Somewhere in there may be the seed of a great idea that you can implement.

Will said that might be your expectation for ChatGPT.

He quotes a line from the 1990s song Gin Blossoms: “If you don’t expect too much from me, you probably won’t be disappointed.”

Know which chatbot is the best

Chatbots can wonderfully explain complex topics like cryptocurrencies as if you were only 5 years old.

To understand this strength, it is important to know that the software has been provided with repositories from Reddit, including a forum called “Explain like I am five”.

(Reddit isn’t happy that it’s a free chatbot teaching aid.)

Similarly, there are many recipes on the internet. That makes ChatGPT a good (but not perfect) for personalized recipe planning.

When I typed into ChatGPT, “Recommend seven dinner options that use a variety of beans and lentils and can be prepared in advance,” I thought the options were solid.

These include a green bean salad with diced peppers, tomatoes, and red onions with lemon vinegar dressing.

I asked ChatGPT to “make me a shopping list with ingredients for the first four dishes” the AI ​​came up with. And it did.

But because chatbots combine online information in sometimes meaningless ways, you shouldn’t rely on AI formula steps.

The chatbot may omit an essential ingredient or tell you a dish is gluten-free when it’s not.

Again, you shouldn’t treat ChatGPT as a trusted cookbook but instead as a meal planning brainstorming partner.

Don’t get discouraged and give up

I was disappointed when I tried using the AI ​​chatbot. Those experiences made me not want to spend time learning how to use technology to suit me.

For example, I asked ChatGPT and Bing’s AI to come up with an itinerary for my New Jersey beach vacation last spring. Those suggestions were so obvious or so unlike me that I would laugh at a friend making similar suggestions.

Will says that while chatbots are far from perfect and aren’t excellent at everything, they are worth your time investment.

He said 5 minutes of travel planning with ChatGPT could spark some ideas for me to research further.

That doesn’t make AI the magical personalized travel planner I want, but it does.