How can Chat GPT – and other generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies – help us in our personal and professional lives? On Wednesday, 2 August 2023, AI specialist Igor Pogany of The AI Advantage led hundreds of attendees from around the world in a “Conquer Chat GPT” webinar from the World YMCA that provided examples of how to use more effectively use Chat GPT through better prompts.
“Think about it as a helpful assistant”, he said, “an assistant that is well-read and educated but doesn’t know anything about you or your company. This assistant can work 24/7 free of charge, but through prompts, it needs to learn your tone, style and voice”.
Although Chat GPT 4, a more robust version, is available for a monthly fee, Chat GPT 3.5 is free and very effective. And in countries where it is not yet available, Igor advised looking for other alternatives, such as Google Bard.
Participants left comments throughout the webinar, asking questions and saying how useful they found the information. Said World YMCA Secretary General Carlos Sanvee at the webinar’s conclusion, “We have learned many new things, and Igor has given us the motivation to seek out information to continue to learn”.
Attending the webinar at midnight her time, Elysse McCabe of Australia said, “As someone who has recently started integrating Chat GPT into my work and day-to-day life, it was awesome to learn how to really refine the prompts to produce quality responses from the AI. I’m excited to start testing the prompts and knowledge Igor has shared to maximise its potential”!
All about the prompt
Referring to the idea of Chat GPT as a helpful assistant, Igor said context is everything.
“If you ask it to write an email for you, it wants to be helpful, so it will give you a generic letter”, he said. “But if you ask to write you an email to a specific person about a specific topic, you’ll get much better results. Context is where people get lost, but if you want to get something useful, it’s all hidden in the context”.
Igor shared a pair of use-case scenarios. In the first, he showed how to refine writing a donation letter. “Chat GPT makes a number of assumptions. If you’re asking for money, it assumes you want a friendly tone that’s not too formal”, he said.
“You don’t have to tell it every detail. And it’s nice because you can write without having someone looking over your shoulder and judging you”. For people who lack confidence in their writing, Chat GPT can make them more comfortable.
In the second use case, we can help Chat GPT write in our style so it sounds more like us or our company voice, Igor said. One trick is to have it analyse previous text you have written for tone, style and voice.
Useful tips
Keep the following in mind, said Igor at the conclusion of the webinar, to maximise your prompts and use of Chat GPT:
- Don’t ask it to do all the work; instead, look for it to do the heavy lifting.
- Rewriting is such an important prompt. Once you have received your first response, ask it to write in another style, such as formal and friendly. “To be most effective, ask it for two styles”, Igor said.
- Have ChatGPT analyse writing that reflects your project; for example, if you want it to help write an email in your prompts use an email you’ve written for best results.
And finally, he said, remember that even a little assistance goes a long way.
“Quality output is simply something you can use”, he said. “If it saves you 10 minutes, then it was a help to you. Celebrate the little wins, and over time they will add up”.