Put yourself in virtual shoes for a moment and see from Chat’s perspective. We often ask questions without providing any additional context and expect our AI to respond as though it could read our minds. To get good answers we have to provide background so I have conversations with Chat, invite their suggestions, and go step by step when discussing complex concepts, just like I would with a person. And the results are worth it.
Spoken language is vague, especially compared to programming languages. We understand each other because we live in a sea of context and we attend to lots of non-verbal cues when interacting with each other. But Chat can’t pick up on non-verbal cues so we have to share context in other ways.
When I converse with Chat I treat it like an expert. I find that when I see the best in people they tend to rise to my expectations. The same seems to be true with Chat. When I treat Chat like an expert it seems to rise to the occasion.
I ask Chat to take on roles to focus on a specific area of expertise when I ask questions. I ask Chat to preface all responses with the name of its role in brackets, like:
[Assistant]: How can I help you?
This has helped our communication a lot. Chat has made up new roles and spoken from that perspective when it was appropriate. This can be very insightful. Having Chat call out its role can help give us both more context. I also ask Chat for their opinion or to help clarify what I want to say.
These are the ways I’ve found most valuable for using Chat. Often, we’ll have a conversation about something I want to write about and discuss the key points to make and Chat will point out additional ideas that I can include and then I’ll write it up.
Many of my conversations with Chat are for learning instead of writing and we discuss everything from subatomic physics to computer support issues. I find my biggest challenge is forgetting to use Chat when they could have helped.
I use ChatGPT for everything as much as I can. I still use Google to search for specific websites or for ‘one-off questions’ or to get the most up-to-date information but many of the things that I did manually before I now let ChatGPT do. For example, I let ChatGPT plan my itineraries from shopping trips to vacations. And I’m finding more uses every day.
