As the field of generative artificial intelligence heats up, consumer-facing chatbots are asking business strategy questions, designing study guides for math classes, offering salary negotiation advice and even writing wedding vows. And things are just getting started.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, Microsoft’s Bing, and Anthropic’s Claude are a few of the current leading chatbots, but more are likely to emerge over the coming year: In venture capital, AI-related generative deals reached 1 worldwide in Q1 .69 billion dollars. this year, up 130% from $0.73 billion last quarter — with an additional $10.68 billion in deals announced but not yet completed in Q1, according to Pitchbook data.
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Two months after launch, ChatGPT surpassed 100 million monthly active users and broke records fastest growing consumer app in history: “phenomenal uptake — frankly, we’ve never seen anything like it, and interest has been growing ever since,” Brian Burke, research vice president at Gartner, told CNBC. “From publication on November 30th to now, our inquiry volume has shot up like a hockey stick; every client wants to know about generative AI and ChatGPT.”
These types of chatbots are built on large language models, or LLMs, a machine learning tool that uses large amounts of internet data to recognize patterns and generate human-sounding language. If you’re a beginner, many sources we spoke to agreed that the best way to get started with a chatbot is to dive in and try things out.
“People spend too much time trying to find the perfect challenge — 80% of it is interactive,” says Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who studies the effects of artificial intelligence on work and education. , he told CNBC.
Here are some tips from the pros:
Keep data privacy in mind.
When you use a chatbot like ChatGPT or Bard, the information you input—what you type, what you receive in response, and the changes you request—can be used to train future models. OpenAI says as much its conditions. Although some companies offer ways to opt out—OpenAI allows this as part of “data control” in ChatGPT’s settings—it’s still best to refrain from sharing sensitive or private data in chatbot conversations, especially as companies continue to improve their privacy measures. For example a ChatGPT error in March, it briefly allowed users to see parts of others’ conversation histories.
“If you wouldn’t post it on Facebook, don’t put it on ChatGPT,” Burke said. “Think of what you put into ChatGPT as public information.”
Offer context.
To get the best return on your time, give the chatbot context about how it should act in this scenario and who the information is for. For example, you can write the persona you want the chatbot to assume in this scenario: “You are a [marketer, teacher, philosopher, etc.].” You can also add context like, “I’m a [client, student, beginner, etc.].” This could save time by directly telling the chatbot what role it should take and what “lens” it should use to convey information in a way that is useful to you.
For example, if you’re a creative consultant and you’re looking for a chatbot to help you analyze company logos, you could write something like, “Act as if you’re a graphic designer studying logo design for companies. I am a client who owns a company and wants to know which logos work best and why. Create an analysis of the ‘best’ corporate logos for publicly traded companies and why they are considered good choices.”
“If you ask the Bard to write an inspirational speech, the Bard’s answer might be a little more general — but if you ask the Bard to write a speech in a specific style, tone, or format, you’re likely to get a much better answer,” Sissie Hsiao, a vice president at Google, told CNBC.
Let the chatbot do all the work.
Sometimes the best way to get what you want is to ask the chatbot itself for advice – whether you’re asking about what’s possible as a user or the best way to phrase a challenge.
“Ask a simple question, what kinds of things can you do? And it gives you a list of things that would actually surprise most people,” Burke said.
You can also game the system by asking something like, “What’s the best way to ask you for help writing a shopping list?” or even assign the chatbot the task of writing a prompt, such as: “Your task is to generate the best and most effective prompts for ChatGPT. Create a list of the best prompts to ask ChatGPT for healthy one-pot dinner recipes.”
Ask for help with brainstorming.
Whether you’re looking for vacation destinations, date ideas, poetry challenges, or content strategies for going viral on social media, many people use chatbots as a starting point for brainstorming.
“The biggest thing … they’re useful for is that they inspire me as a user and help me learn things that I wouldn’t necessarily think of on my own,” Josh Albrecht, CTO of Generally Intelligent, an AI research startup. , he told CNBC. “Maybe that’s why they’re called generative AI — they’re really useful in the generative part, the brainstorming.”
Create a crash course.
Let’s say you’re trying to learn geometry and you consider yourself a beginner. You can start your studies by asking the chatbot something like: “Explain the basics of geometry as if I were a beginner” or “Explain the Pythagorean theorem as if I were a five-year-old”.
If you’re looking for something more extensive, you can ask the chatbot to create a “crash course” for you, stating how much time you have (three days, a week, a month) or how many hours you want to spend learning a new skill. You can write something like, “I’m a beginner who wants to learn to skateboard. Create a two-week plan to learn to skateboard and do a kickflip.”
To expand your curriculum beyond chatbot, you can also ask for a list of top books on the topic, some of the most influential people in the field, and any other resources that could help you expand your skills.
Don’t be afraid to make comments and ask for changes.
“The worst thing you could do if you’re actually trying to use ChatGPT output is [to] just ask one thing once and walk away,” Mollick said. “You get very generic output. You have to communicate with it.”
Sometimes you don’t choose the ideal prompt, or the chatbot doesn’t generate the output you were looking for—and that’s okay. You can still refine the information to make it more useful, such as asking follow-up questions like, “Can you make this sound less general?” or “Can you make the first paragraph more interesting?” or even rephrase your original question in a different way.
Take everything with many grains of salt.
Chatbots have a documented tendency to make up information, especially when their training data doesn’t fully cover the area you’re asking about, so it’s important to take everything with a grain of salt. Let’s say you’re asking for Albert Einstein’s biography: A chatbot might tell you that the famous scientist wrote a book called “How to be Smart,” but unfortunately he never did. Because large language models are trained on large swaths of the Internet, they are also the best at pattern recognition, meaning they can generate biased output or misinformation based on their training data.
“Where there’s less information, it just forms,” Burke said, adding, “These hallucinations are extremely convincing… You can’t trust that these models will always give you accurate information.”
Experiment and try different approaches.
Whether you’re asking a chatbot to generate an action list from a meeting transcript or translate something from English to Tagalog, there are countless use cases for generative AI. So when using a chatbot, it’s worth thinking about the things you want to learn or need help with and experimenting with how well the system can deliver.
“AI is a universal technology; he does a lot of things, so the idea is that whatever field and whatever job you’re in, he’s going to affect aspects of your job differently than anyone else on the planet. Mollick said. “It’s about thinking about how you want to use it… You have to figure out a way to work with the system… and the only way to do that is to experiment.”
