You might have got the impression that I am against “AI” such as ChatGPT, but in fact these tools are increasingly useful in my day-to-day work.
So-called “AI” tools have the potential to save us a lot of wasted time, allowing you to put your energy to good use.
What I do NOT like is where they are used to take fun, profitable, creative work away from humans, or to misrepresent/mislead.
There have been a lot of well-publicised events where so called AI was really dumb, and even dangerous.
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We now know what these “AI” tools are bad at:
- They can’t empathize or show actual experience.
- Systems trained on other people’s content can’t add to knowledge, just calculate or regurgitate.
- Despite marketing claims, they do not “understand“ anything, just give the impression that they do.
- So far I have yet to find one that is good at writing – they are cliche-generating machines.
- Algorithms are not very good at detecting satire or trustworthiness.
So the phrase I saw from a couple of people (I don’t know who said it originally) stands:
“If you couldn’t be bothered to write it, why should I bother reading it?”
These tools can do a lot more than help you avoid writing original articles or social media comments, though.
The tools that are marketed as Artificially Intelligent aren’t.
Anything with actual artificial intelligence is not in the hands of people like you and me.
What they really are comes down to pattern matching systems, auto-complete on steroids, fancy calculators, or machine-learning assisted parsers.
Even the often touted use of ChatGPT for brainstorming isn’t really coming up with “new ideas” so much as a mad-libs tool tied into Google would.
But don’t get me wrong, even these limited tools are extremely impressive compared to what we had just a few years ago, and can be helpful for us right now.
1. Summarizing and Translating
In my client work I have to do a lot of reading in areas far out of my area of expertise. Despite my galaxy-sized brain, even I can’t learn every subject imaginable just in case that is what my next client writes about. This is where automatic summaries come in:
To make it even easier for me, I’ve created a suite of tools (that I will be sharing with paid clients soon in the client member area) that allow me to plug in a URL and get out a bullet summary, such as:
Or this one that works on YouTube videos:
I am sure you can imagine how much time I save not having to sit through a list of 45 minute videos to see which are worthwhile viewing.
Where you can start to really stretch these tools is then using them to explain the topic to you like you are 5.
Remember also that these tools do not care what language the source material is in, so consider it as a slightly smarter Google Translate too!
2. Reformatting and Expanding
ChatGPT comes in handy for one-off tasks that in the past would have required laborious cut and paste, or for me to write a macro or script for.
Take this example where I had to change my Amazon Associates links. I simply pasted the existing HTML, asked it to extract the Amazon product codes, and then generate new links:
These tools understand a whole bunch of different formats and structures of information, in fact I often ask for results in Markdown or CSV formats because I can then plug that into other tools without getting formatting code in the way.
Now consider my earlier points about the downsides. You can supply the information and help prevent unfortunate hallucinations.
If you give the tool a list of facts in bullet form, it can take your facts and expand into paragraphs or more. It will, of course, take a bunch of human editing (especially if you don’t habitually say “In the dynamic ever-changing realm of charcuterie” or “I am going to take you on a fast-paced deep-dive into the online digital landscape that is the laundry industry“).
3. Domain Specific FAQ / Knowledge Base Search Engine
One of the bad things about these AI tools is they were set gobbling up so much hard work of authors without their consent, but now the knowledge is there we can make use of it.
Take this example where I had a bunch of chips and I didn’t know which they were:
Did I have to turn to ChatGPT for this? No, but it saved me a lot of going to Google, entering a code, looking at the result, and then pasting/writing.
4. “AI” Study Partner
The great thing is you can ask follow-up questions that you might be afraid of asking a human being for fear of looking ignorant.
A fun thing to do once you have some new-found knowledge is ask it to test you!
5. Extracting and Filtering
As well as reformatting data, you can also use ChatGPT to filter or extract certain information.
Take this client SEO report, for example. First I asked for just the columns I need:
Nothing you can’t do in Excel so far, right?
But once you have the data in the tool you can ask questions about it, such as “which [brand] term was most recently updated and has serp features“, for one random example.
6. Code (Snippets) and Math Equations
Despite what some people hawking courses are suggesting, GPT tools are not quite ready to develop a whole application, or even an entire WordPress plugin, quite yet.
At least, not one that would work correctly, without security vulnerabilities, have zero conflicts with other code, and would be easily maintainable.
Don’t believe me, by all means let it loose! It’s your website, you do you.
What it can do quite well, though, is give you code snippets. The answers aren’t always perfect, but with some back and forth you can test small units and arrive at a solution that benefits you.
It’s mainly best for boilerplate code and very simple solutions right now. All to often things have changed after the last time the tool was given fresh data, or it will hallucinate functions or libraries that it feels should exist, but actually do not.
Even for languages last popular in the 1980s.
Ask it to help you with Google Sheets macros and formulas, it very often gives you just what you need without having to read through a bunch of different tutorials.
When using ChatGPT for mathematics, I like it to walk me through how it arrived at the result, so I can learn as well as get an answer.
7. Translating Programming Languages
A really cool use of ChatGPT and others for programmers is translating from one language to another, as with human languages, but for programming languages.
Last year I set about learning a bunch of newer programming languages and environments to keep my knowledge and skills up to date. Using ChatGPT in this way helped solidify what I was learning because I could take what I was familiar with, eg. Java which I had used since it was released to the public, and Go which I was new to.
Confession: I Have Used AI Generated Art
Even though I am told I can draw, and I actually enjoy it, I have used generative art tools in the past out of a lack of confidence.
That is taking work away from artists and photographers, so I am going to only use those tools to assist me in future, not replace the work of people who depend on it for a living.
The only way I am going to gain confidence is by practicing and sharing, right?
ChatGPT (other than how it was populated) is not good or bad, it is just a tool. If you use it as you would search and replace, Google, or Grammarly, or a Photoshop plugin, it is just another way to be more productive and get a better result.
I could go further with more examples, but I don’t want to just tell you what I think, go ahead and explore and see what they can do for you and your work.
Just do not use it fully-hands-off, because if you can’t be bothered to create it, why would we consume it?