Have you heard the hype around ChatGPT lately and wondered what it is? Here’s an overview of what it is, what it’s used for, some pitfalls, and some examples of how I’ve been using it in recent weeks.

ChatGPT: Level up your productivity

So what is it anyway?

Have you heard the hype around ChatGPT lately and wondered what it is? You may have heard people talking about AI-generated art, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, but aren’t sure what it all means. As with all rapid advances in technology, people have plenty of questions, concerns, and doubts.

So, what is ChatGPT? It is a large language model developed by OpenAI that is designed to generate human-like, conversational text. Based on GPT-3, it is the most advanced of its kind (as of writing) and produces natural, accurate results. It uses Deep Learning (a type of AI, aka Artificial Intelligence) and is trained with real data from human interactions to learn how to respond to user input. You can ask it questions, have it rephrase text, write code, generate content based on some instructions and do many other tasks. It is pretty powerful, and I will discuss some ways people (including me!) are using it to boost productivity.

To learn more about ChatGPT, check out OpenAI’s blog, I’ve also linked a few articles at the bottom of this one.

What can I use it for?

My favourite productivity boosts

Anyone can try it for free, and I highly recommend experimenting with it over on OpenAI Chat. I also use Notion AI on a daily basis - essential if you’re already a Notion user!

ChatCPT has many business applications, such as automating customer service and creating interactive chatbots, as well as personal[1] uses. I’m going to focus on personal productivity here.

✏️ Content & Writing

Check my text for…

  • Check text for spelling and grammar
  • Re-write text in a different tone (more professional, more friendly etc)
  • Check text for biased or non-inclusive language

Check your text for non-inclusive or biased language

Format this text…

  • Turn bullet points or rough notes into proper, paragraphed text
  • Pull out action items/bullet points from a bunch of text
  • Summarise a bunch of text

Turn your rough notes into proper, formatted paragraphs

Give me a template for…

  • Templates/outline for meeting agendas, team wikis, documentation
  • 30-day exercise/healthy meal plan
  • Anything you can think of!

Generate a template or outline for anything that you’re working on

Quickly put together a meal or exercise plan

🤖 Coding

I was hugely inspired by the blog post ChatGPT built all of my code to start using ChatGPT for my day-to-day coding (which I don’t get as much time for as I’d like these days!).

Give me the outline for…

  • Generate scaffolding for a web page, a function, a file
  • Coding can involve a lot of boilerplate, this can speed things up (NB: there are a tonne of boilerplate projects you can find online that provide best-in-class boilerplate for different types of web app and this isn’t going to compete… this is just a very basic example)
  • Improve and develop existing code (“add a four-column responsive grid”, “add SEO tags”…)
  • The really cool thing; ChatGPT often explains what it has done & alternatives/considerations 😎

Generate some boilerplate code

Write me a script that does…

  • Again, great for quickly generating boilerplate code
  • Great for generating quick scripts or functions to automate tasks
  • Great for learning about different types of algorithm and ways to implement (e.g. sorting algos)

Quickly generate a script to automate a repetitive task. PS. this code works!

Debugging, explaining code, optimising code

Caveat…

I wouldn’t recommend relying solely on ChatGPT for content generation, particularly on topics of which you don’t already understand; e.g. if you don’t know how to code, I would definitely not recommend that you generate code with it (any dev will be able to tell you about the dangers of copy-pasting something without properly understanding it - it will come back to bite you later). BUT if you are learning to code, it’s a great resource to help you understand what a piece of code is doing, or how you might go about refactoring it. I know how to read & write code, so I can recognise whether any code that is generated is doing what I expected it to.

Don’t use it to write your essay or write a blog post (well you could, and people have been… at their own peril)! People have been caught using ChatGPT to plagiarise school work[2][3].

That leads me on to…

Risks and Pitfalls

We cannot ignore it as an incredible productivity boosting tool. You can really use it to enhance the work that you are already doing, and speed up and improve your workflows.

However, there are some known issues with it to be aware of. As I mentioned, beware of relying on it too heavily to generate content that you will be passing as your own; particularly on topics that you yourself do not understand. If you use ChatGPT to complete your homework quickly - are you missing the point of the homework? Did you learn about something in a way that is likely to stick in your brain? The benefit of researching something and putting it into your own words is more than just the output at the end; it’s the process of learning and understanding that you went through.

There are known issues around race and gender bias within the tool, that come from the way the model is trained[4]. From their blog:

While we’ve made efforts to make the model refuse inappropriate requests, it will sometimes respond to harmful instructions or exhibit biased behavior. We’re using the Moderation API to warn or block certain types of unsafe content, but we expect it to have some false negatives and positives for now. We’re eager to collect user feedback to aid our ongoing work to improve this system.

There is concern about the way it is trained and the data used[2], issues with accuracy/correctness of results, and you’re likely to frequently be unable to access it due to capacity issues (all the hype has lead to a lot of traffic).

The end

I continue to be impressed with the results I’m seeing with tools like this to speed up my day-to-day workload. I don’t see it as a replacement for creativity or ‘doing work’… simply a productivity tool in the toolbox to get stuff done. Like anything in life, there are pros, cons, things to look out for. Give it a go and make up your own mind - let me know how it goes 👇😎

References

Credits

Title Photo by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash