Mastering the AI Era: How ChatGPT Makes my Life Easier (And Yours Too!)

A Step-by-Step Guide to Integrating AI into Your Personal and Professional Routines

This article is strictly about a single question. Will AI catch on?

My answer to this question is, absolutely!

Yes, undoubtably the entire world will incorporate AI into itself within the next few years.

For those of you out there who know nothing about the current situation with AI, let me give you a brief explanation.

A few months ago OpenAI released their ChatGPT client with their newest model GPT-3. This model was only a text interpreter, all it can do is read text and create responses in text. You can actually use this now if you go to this link.

I’ve followed chat AI’s for a long, long time. This AI blew everything else out of the water! It was incredible! It is able to solve problems, role-play, and program. It occasionally would just make up answers out of the blue, but its proficiency with just maintaining a conversation immediately made it better than every iteration before it.

Its amazing that just months down the line people’s biggest complaints with the system itself is its correctness, and not its conversational skills! YES!! Its crazy!!

I wanted to shed light on the kinds of ways that I have incorporated chatGPT into my life and workflow. I’m an early adopter of AI but the cases I use the AI for can easily be taken on by anyone. Its hard for me to describe how much of our life will be consumed by AI just a few years down the line.

Demonstration Time!

ChatGPT as a source of feedback

This may shock you, but chatGPT makes an excellent mentor for trying new things. Yes it only outputs text, and perhaps its best guess is not that great. I am able to copy and paste my resume into the chatbox and ask it for advice. It will compliment what I have done well, and point out what could use work!

I think even if it has no idea what it’s talking about, having some non-human entity ready and willing to review my work at all times is such a valuable resource to have!!! Plus the extra attention to detail helps anyway!

Basically anything created with written word can be given and corrected in a way that is still very human. Which to me is great!

This also extends to other things like programming code. If you have a problem you can just give it the code and ask it for feedback. It (sometimes) can find the problem.

ChatGPT as a co-writer

We’ve all been there. We’ve taken extensive notes on a topic, but now we have to turn the notes into an essay. It’s basically just copy and pasting with some extra steps. If only there was a person we could pay to just turn the notes into an essay….

Well my friend, I’d like to introduce you to ChatGPT. Give it your notes, and the essay requirements and it can transform your notes into an excellently written essay. No seriously.

The reason I prefer this method over just having chatgpt write the whole thing for you is that chatgpt is actually a terrible writer. It makes things up, and sums up entire paragraphs with just a couple words. But it is very, very good at transforming already existing work. Like for example, an essay research doc into an essay. So it still sounds like you, and pulls from your personal experiences.

I use this for all kinds of stuff like cover letters, and other official documents that need to be formatted in a specific way. I obviously still go over the text and fix where it struggled, but it saves me so much time!

The other thing I’ve done is take turns writing a story with ChatGPT where we trade off sections. Then after that I compile what worked and flesh out the details to make it feel good. But if you read the upcoming article “The Haunting of Ilya Petrov” this is the method I used to create the article.

ChatGPT as a Content Creator

ChatGPT is also very good at “automatable” tasks. Like what you may say? Well, how do I get the images for the articles I write.

Well I use an AI image generator since that allows me to own all the images I generate. Well… what does the AI image generator need? A text prompt! Oh Wait!

I can tell ChatGPT what kind of prompts work well, have it come up with an art style, and some celebrity look-alikes for the story. Then have it write the descriptions for some images based off the story.

After that I just copy and paste those prompts into the image generator, bada bing, bada boom.

This is all linear prompt-craft though.

If you want to jump to prompt-calculus ask the AI to create a set of prompts that would help ChatGPT achieve a certain task.

One experiment I did was ask ChatGPT “Come up with a set of prompts for ChatGPT that would get it to make a portfolio website from scratch”

It came up with this:

Which came out really good!

Sure enough it gave me a list of prompts that I opened another window and copy pasted into the thing. Since I don’t know all the things required to make a good website this process allowed the second level chat window to have much more nuanced insight into the process. Crazy!

ChatGPT as a Document Explainer

Oh god! I hate reading dense, boring articles. So one of the things I started doing was just copy-pasting the text from the article into a chat window with chatGPT. Then I can talk to chatGPT as an expert who HAS read the article!

Now I can learn from it in the order that I want in ways that are informed by the article, and ask it for page numbers with the associated information.

This is all just the tip of the iceberg

What I’ve explained is all the ways that I “A Student” utilize ChatGPT on a daily basis in order to make my life easier.

This does not even reach the level of complexity capable with a system like this. Since it is capable of such intricate logic reasoning, you could hook it up to a text reader, and give it commands that link up to functions on a computer. From there it would theoretically be able to handle many basic tasks by just linking up to the computer interface through text commands.

To take it another step further, you allow chatgpt to deploy smaller versions of itself on individual tasks, allow them to browse the web, identify and solve issues. Now it can solve much larger, multi-task problems with a single entity parenting the other child entities.

Problems and Biases

Its important when using tools like this that you also understand the risks. ChatGPT makes errors. It makes errors quite often actually. Thats important to understand that it is more of a thought experiment and should be used to guide your focus to things of importance. As it is right now it is not a perfect solution.

ChatGPT is also biased. It was trained off the data from the internet! The internet is incredibly biased, and if you plan on using it to come up with ideas, make sure you run them by people and get actual feedback. Unlike what I’m doing. Like did you notice that whenever there was an author generated by the image generator it was always male. The prompt was this:

a Digital Futurism representation of the author learning from a dense, complex article. The learning process is simplified and made engaging by the digital presence of ChatGPT.

And yet the AI image generator always generated a white male in the authors place. Where the digital being was a woman. As seen in the collage below of different renders from the same prompt.

The gender of ChatGPT’s representation being a woman in the images was circumstance, but only kind of. I used the same prompt that I use for my short stories so It picked a celebrity look-alike nearly at random. I can’t say who it chose, but I will say that it very rarely chooses black, or female actors. Unless explicitly told to. Which feels like a reflection on the bias in Holywood, and Film Media as a whole.

Then there is the lovecraftian ethical question of using an AI like this at all. But that’s big, and scary, and outside the scope of this article.

Conclusion

All in all ChatGPT is the kind of thing that will power the tech giants of the future. It will be integrated into every facet of our lives, invisibly, and the fact that it is so useful for just a single person is just further proof of its concept. Either through, content feedback, automation, or content creation, ChatGPT has many potential use cases in our daily lives to “automate the boring stuff.”

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