ChatGPT is an AI-powered chatbot, with a unique ability to communicate with people in a human-like way. The large language model is equipped with cutting-edge natural language processing capabilities, and has been trained on massive amounts of data — all of which enables it to not only generate written content, but actually converse with users fluently.
Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT is revolutionizing the artificial intelligence space, and has the potential to disrupt seemingly every industry. Whether it’s answering a question, generating a piece of prose or writing code, ChatGPT is continuing to push the boundaries of human creativity and productivity. It also has the potential to alter our very relationship to the internet, particularly when it comes to search.
Interesting Ways to Use ChatGPT
- Prepare for a job interview
- Report the news
- Debug code
- Write songs
- Grade homework
- Play games
- Help you cook
- As a (sort of) search engine
It’s important to note, however, that this technology does not come without some limitations. ChatGPT is notoriously inaccurate, generating what experts call “hallucinations,” or content that is stylistically correct but factually wrong. The answers generated are also limited to the data it has been trained on, which only goes up to 2021. And, like any AI model, ChatGPT has a tendency to produce biased results.
All of these flaws have and will continue to impact ChatGPT’s performance. So, as the saying goes, forewarned is forearmed. It’s good practice to double-check the information that ChatGPT provides before using it. And, to be safe, don’t use the information generated by ChatGPT to make critical financial or health decisions without thorough verification and maybe even a second or third opinion. While it is certainly an impressive piece of artificial intelligence, ChatGPT is still very much a work in progress.
Still, this talkative bot can be used in a variety of interesting ways. And now that OpenAI has dropped GPT-4, this is likely just the tip of the iceberg.
ChatGPT Examples
Job Search Examples
ChatGPT Can Write Your Cover Letter
Without a doubt, cover letters are one of the most tedious and time-consuming parts of any job hunt, particularly if you’re applying to several different jobs at once. There are only so many ways one can express how excited they are about a particular company, or distill their career in an engaging way. Fortunately, ChatGPT can do the heavy lifting.
ChatGPT Can Improve Your Resume
Thanks to its natural language processing capabilities, ChatGPT can take an existing piece of text and make improvements on it. So, if you already have a resume written up, ChatGPT can be a useful tool in making it that much better. In a world where you can be competing with thousands of people for one job, this can be a good way to stand out among the rest.
ChatGPT Can Help You Prepare for an Interview
A tried-and-true way to prepare for any upcoming job interview is to have practice runs, where you test out talking points and run through various scenarios. ChatGPT can help, with the ability to generate anything from hypothetical questions to intelligent responses to those questions. It can give you tips for how to dress, or etiquette suggestions. It can even offer a few jokes, if you’re feeling playful.
Content Generation Examples
ChatGPT Can Generate Newsletter Ideas
Newsletters can be a great way for companies and individuals alike to increase visibility, as well as draw traffic to their site. But coming up with consistently solid topic ideas that align with one’s brand can be challenging. With a brief prompt, ChatGPT can not only churn out newsletter ideas, but it can also draft up an outline and even write the entire thing. And once it has written the content, it can translate the text into several different languages.
ChatGPT Can Write a Marketing Email
When it comes to marketing, email is an essential line of communication with customers. ChatGPT can be used to generate not only the written content within the email itself, but suggestions for eye-catching subject lines as well — which can make all the difference when it is sent to an inbox with hundreds or thousands of other emails. It can also help marketers quickly create an email marketing calendar that schedules regular sends while avoiding weekends or holidays, which could affect an email’s open and read-through rates.
ChatGPT Can Report the News
Again, ChatGPT has been trained on several terabytes of data across the internet, making it quite knowledgeable on many subjects. This knowledge can easily be used to generate quick news articles, or to distill the contents of a longer piece written by a human. Media outlets including BuzzFeed, Fortune and (controversially) CNET have all folded ChatGPT into their editorial endeavors.
ChatGPT Can Be a Copywriter
Consider the immense amount of content that exists on something like an e-commerce site — the product descriptions, the image captions, the alerts about certain sales or deals — not to mention all of the promotional emails, social media posts and advertisements. Until very recently, all of that copy had to be written and edited by humans. But now, ChatGPT can handle it in a matter of seconds. Plus, it can generate several iterations of that copy so it can be targeted to specific people.
Coding Examples
ChatGPT Can Debug Your Code
Novice and veteran coders alike have long been looking to sites like Stack Overflow and Reddit for help in both writing and debugging their code. Now, ChatGPT can be a useful tool as well. All they have to do is type in a line of code, and the chatbot will not only identify problems and fix them, but also explain why it made the decisions it did. ChatGPT is also capable of developing complete blocks of functional code (in many different languages) on its own, as well as translating code from one language to another. But, when it comes to code written by someone (or, in this case, something) else, it’s important that you fully understand how the code works before deploying it.
ChatGPT Can Help Create Machine Learning Algorithms
ChatGPT can even handle something as complicated as machine learning, so long as the user inputs the appropriate data. This can be in the form of labels, numbers or any other data that is useful in training a chatbot. Then, ChatGPT can act as a sort of data scientist and provide anything from an example for a linear regression machine learning algorithm, to an example of a machine learning model capable of predicting sales revenue.
ChatGPT Can Answer Coding-Related Questions
Coders can also look to ChatGPT for advice on specific coding-related questions. Whether a person wants to figure out a way to animate a button on their Shopify page, or set up a snapshot tool in a Fastlane configuration file, ChatGPT usually has some tips for how to make it happen. And it can even do it in the style of a fast-talkin’ wiseguy from a 1940s gangster movie if you ask it to. Just a reminder, though: ChatGPT can absolutely get things wrong. In fact, Stack Overflow has temporarily banned ChatGPT-generated responses from its platform, citing the bot’s penchant for errors.
Art and Music Examples
ChatGPT Can Brainstorm Ideas for AI Generated Art
While ChatGPT is not capable of producing images itself, it can still be helpful in the creation of AI-generated art. Most AI art generators require that the user input a text prompt describing what they want the model to produce. If you’re having a hard time coming up with a good prompt to feed a given generator, ChatGPT can help. For example, one user asked ChatGPT for some “interesting, fantastical ways of decorating a living room” and then plugged the bot’s answers right into MidJourney.
ChatGPT Can Be Your Creative Writing Assistant
Although many writers have railed against using ChatGPT to produce pieces of creative writing, it can certainly be a useful tool. Instead of replacing writers outright, ChatGPT can serve as a kind of writing assistant — helping to generate ideas, produce story outlines, provide various character perspectives, and more. And it doesn’t have to be a longform novel either, ChatGPT can help write things like poems and screenplays, too.
ChatGPT Can Write Songs
ChatGPT can also write songs. Complete with chord progressions and lyrics organized into verses and choruses, these tunes can be tweaked to fit into specific genres, eras and subject matters. Of course, if a user wants to actually hear the piece, they’ll have to play it on an instrument.
Education Examples
ChatGPT Can Grade Homework
Teachers have grown increasingly wary of ChatGPT and its propensity to help students cheat on assignments, prompting some schools to completely block access to it. But just as students can use ChatGPT to compose essays, teachers can use it to grade them. All they have to do is input the work and ask the chatbot to assess it. Not only will ChatGPT provide a grade, but it will also offer reasons why and recommendations for improving it.
ChatGPT Can Generate Quiz and Test Questions
For educators who are pressed on time, ChatGPT can help generate specific test and quiz questions. These can be tailored according to subject matter, format (multiple choice, word problems, gap-fill exercises and so on), and more. It can even generate an answer key to go along with the questions.
ChatGPT Can Explain Complex Topics
Whether a user is trying to understand quantum computing or dark matter, ChatGPT is exceptionally good at explaining complex topics in lay terms — providing sort of nutshell descriptions that anyone could understand. This capability can be useful in all kinds of contexts, but it can be an especially helpful resource for students, teachers and tutors looking to break down complicated concepts and get a firmer understanding of them.
Other Interesting Examples
ChatGPT Can Help You Cook
Have you ever looked in your pantry and refrigerator and wondered what you could create with what few ingredients you have? It turns out, ChatGPT can help with that. In fact, ChatGPT has the potential to be the sous chef of your dreams — whether you need it to figure out complimentary sides to a main dish or generate a weekly meal plan and grocery list.
ChatGPT Can Play Games
Or, if you’re looking to just kill some time, ChatGPT can also be a great source of entertainment. The chatbot is capable of playing a number of word games, all a user has to do is prompt it to. Some of the most popular games to play with ChatGPT include 20 questions, would you rather, and even choose your own adventure. Although it isn’t very good at rock-paper-scissors.
ChatGPT Can Offer Advice
Like any AI model, ChatGPT is not capable of having its own true emotions, and it is not especially good at reading the emotions of others. But it can be a good sounding board if you have a personal problem you need to work through. So far, the bot has been used to give advice on everything from relationships to finances. However, it is important to note that ChatGPT is not a therapist or domain expert in anything, so every bit of guidance it gives must be taken with a massive grain of salt.
ChatGPT Can Be Used As a (Sort Of) Search Engine
One of the buzziest (and, perhaps, most controversial) uses for ChatGPT is its functionality as a quasi search engine, offering simple answers as opposed to a list of websites to sift through. But there are several reasons why ChatGPT is not as effective a tool as something like Google — perhaps the most important of which is that, while the chatbot uses data from the open internet to generate responses, it does not have the ability to actually search the internet for new information. And since the data the base model has been trained on is limited to 2021 and earlier, it does not have the awareness of events or news that have occurred since then. Still, users’ propensity to ask ChatGPT questions they would ordinarily ask Google has sparked an all-out arms race, with the tech giant launching its own AI-enabled web search tool mere hours before Microsoft dropped a new version of Bing, which is powered by ChatGPT.
