My Top-10 Uses for ChatGPT
It’s been about a year of using ChatGPT as a daily tool in my arsenal. Thankfully the hysteria around it has faded a bit. Don’t get me wrong, the AI robots still may take our jobs and end life on this planet as we know it — but probably not before Spring.
I’ve hopped on tons of the hype trains trying out all kinds of different tactics, but a year in, what I’ve settled on are a few basic things that ChatGPT comes in clutch for… I thought you might get some benefit from that list, so here it is (in no particular order):
- Explain this to me like I’m a child. Those complex topics that I would write off as being “over my head” much more accessible with a simple prompt asking to explain them like you’re a child. I feel like a child every time I ask — but no one can see and I learn something new! Once I have that basic understanding, it’s much easier to play catch up to have an adult conversation on the topic.
- Re-organize/Re-format. You still have to be careful it doesn’t hallucinate or omit information, but it’s a huge time-saver to have ChatGPT do boring, monotonous tasks like extracting fist names from a list, wrapping something in HTML tags, taking paragraphs of information and displaying it in tables, or oganizing your grocery list by department.
- Comments for my code. I’ve been pretty terrible at adding comments in my code. To be fair, most of it so basic it needs no explanation — but I’ve also just been lazy. While I’ve have mixed-results on having it write code for me, it does an awesome job of documentation.
- Outlines. I’ve yet to find AI content I enjoy reading, so I tend to avoid publishing its copywriting (though there are exceptions)… But its been a huge help in getting my wheels spinning. When I have a topic idea, I’ll often ask ChatGPT to write an outline for an article on that topic. It always helps me consider a thing or two that I might have omitted.
- Summaries. Who doesn’t love a good ‘tl;dr’? I’m sure I could get better at summarizing article, but ChatGPT does a pretty bang-up job already — so I’m taking the shortcut. I’ve added “Key Takeaway” sections to some of my more active blogs. As a user, I really enjoy the user experience when I just want to make sure I’m on the right article.
- Thesaurus (on steroids). Nerdy to admit it, but Thesaurus.com has been one of my favorite websites (not that I use fancy words, I just sometimes can’t think of the most basic ones ????). But unlike a thesaurus, ChatGPT can suggest different ways to say entire sentences or phrases.
- Brainstorming. You know when you just need to throw out a bunch of ideas and see what sticks? I’ll often ask ChatGPT to give me 10 X ideas, or 100 suggestions for Y. I’m usually not even through its list before a suggestion sends me down a path that would have taken me hours (or weeks, or months) to come up with staring at the ceiling.
- Critiques. Did you know you can upload a screenshot of a website to ChatGPT and ask it to critique the design, layout and copy? Is it perfect? No… But it usually gives me a thing or two to consider that I wasn’t seeing from my perspective. This, to me, is huge when you mostly work alone.
- Airtable/Notion formulas. While I’ve seen it get some pretty basic math wrong, it’s helped me write formulas for my databases that I would have never come up with on my own. I was always pretty terrible at these, so maybe this impresses me more because it’s not something I’m good at.
- Having fun with the kids. There’s no doubt AI will have a bigger impact on my kid’s lives than it will mine, so I’ve introduced it to all 3 of them. They all enjoy asking it to tell insane stories or make pictures out of the wildest thoughts in their imagination (I’m probably on some ‘watch list’ now ????).
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