How to Use Open Chat GPT Properly?

Introduction to Open Chat GPT

It was the big release of 2023: OpenChat GPT! Since then, everyone’s been talking about it, AI is everywhere, to the point that the term is used incorrectly half the time (not to mention “AI Washing” in most cases).

But beyond this feeling of technological disruption, what can we “ACTUALLY” do well with AI?

Sure, we save time, but if the adoption of Open Chat GPT is sometimes slow in certain sectors, it’s not without reason.

I’m not going to make friends here, but oh well (you know I don’t care), too bad: most of the time, the error is between the chair and the keyboard.

Yes, I know, shocking, but I’ll explain why…

Introduction to Open Chat GPT and its Capabilities

Open Chat GPT, a revolution in the field of artificial intelligence, is a natural language processing model developed by OpenAI. It stands out for its ability to understand and generate text contextually, making it incredibly versatile for many applications. Whether it’s answering questions, writing text, translating languages, or even creating artistic content, Open Chat GPT can do it with amazing precision and fluidity.

But beware, not all Open Chat GPTs are created equal…

Brief History and Evolution of the Model

The origin of Open Chat GPT dates back to the creation of GPT (Generative Pretrained Transformer) by OpenAI. Over the years, this model has evolved through different versions, becoming increasingly sophisticated. Each version brought significant improvements in language understanding, response capabilities, and text generation. This constant evolution reflects OpenAI’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of what artificial intelligence can achieve.

However, once the initial excitement passes, we quickly realize what the model’s limits are: hallucination.

To put it simply, Open Chat GPT is a very polite parrot with an incredible memory. But when it doesn’t know something, to avoid looking too ignorant, it will still answer something, even anything, as long as its output algorithms have calculated the “most probable answer”.

So if it doesn’t match reality, well… Too bad!

That’s the first limitation.

The second limitation is the cost of computation. When you ask GPT a question, dozens of processes start working in parallel. And that’s expensive.

And since OpenChat GTP 3.5 is a loss leader (it’s free, so everyone can test it), of course, they have to limit the damage. The result, undeniable, is confirmed even more once you’ve tested version 4: Open Chat GPT 3.5 gives sometimes approximate answers, even completely rotten ones.

And it’s even worse when you ask it to code.

I saw it in class give function fragments straight out of an old IE 7 fix (2004 called later saying they wanted their code snippet back).

In short, I’ll say it very clearly: if you stick with Chat GPT 3.5, you’re seeing nothing, or so little, of what this magnificent tool can do for you…

The real breakthrough was Open Chat GPT 4, with previous versions still being far too approximate. During tests conducted by Open AI, GPT 3.5 was in the bottom 10% of students on the American bar exam, while version 4 approached the top 10%…

Growing Importance of AI in Daily Life

Through major announcements, marketing, and communication, AI has gradually made its way. It’s used in various fields such as education, customer service, marketing, and even healthcare. Its ability to quickly analyze large amounts of data and provide relevant answers makes it a valuable tool for improving efficiency and productivity in many sectors. The growing adoption of this technology demonstrates its potential to transform the way we work and communicate, for better (and sometimes for worse).

Last year, I saw it a lot in training center papers: many students running late used AI to save time. The problem is that it was very obvious, and reading 80 pages of BS made in Chat GPT, don’t think it helps the candidate, quite the contrary.

But beyond the legitimate dismay of teachers, we could clearly see a groundswell on the horizon, without fully measuring how much this was going to change our professional practices.

Understanding the Basic Features

Once past the feeling of amazement (“Houston, it looks like the web is going to change a lot…”), we reluctantly get on Open AI, create our account, and look at what we can do with this thing, aware of the inevitable and merciless character of technical progress, this merciless thing ready to smash everything in front of it…

Technical progress is like a train that passes only once: either you get on it, or you stay on the platform. And if you have the misfortune to cross the tracks thinking it’ll be fine, you take it in the face…

Description of Main Features

Open Chat GPT offers an extended range of features, each designed to fully exploit artificial intelligence capabilities in language processing. Among the most remarkable, we find text generation (we’ll be able to cut web writing costs), contextual understanding (we’ll be able to summarize text very easily), language translation, and the ability to conduct natural conversations (hey, a new ChatBot model. Ask Nova what she thinks). This model can also answer complex questions, write summaries, and even generate creative ideas for various projects.

Examples of Common Uses

Open Chat GPT applications are as diverse as its capabilities. For example, in the education sector, it can serve to create personalized educational content or help with academic text revision.

Yes, it doesn’t just go one way; we teachers can also create content for our students.

In customer service, it can power chatbots capable of responding precisely and quickly to user requests (Nova?).

Writers and marketers use it to generate content ideas or write SEO-optimized texts. I actually talk about this in this article, and I explain that it will contribute to exploding the number of web pages, and force Google to reorient its response generation strategy…

Limitations and Usage Constraints

While at first glance, when you’ve taken your “Open Chat GPT Plus” account, you’re quickly seduced by the tool’s incredible capabilities, you quickly realize that Open Chat GPT has its limits.

Its ability to understand and generate text is sometimes limited by the data it was trained on, which can lead to inaccurate or inadequate responses in certain contexts. If version 4 (the most recent) is “fresh,” those who stayed on version 3.5 now have more than two years of obsolescence.

It’s also important to note that, although it’s a powerful tool for generating content, it doesn’t replace human judgment, particularly in areas requiring specific expertise or deep understanding.

To put it another way, if you’re not an expert in your field, and Chat GPT tells you nonsense, will you realize it? There’s therefore an inherent risk in using text generation: looking like a fool.

Managing confidentiality and sensitive data is also a crucial point to consider when using this type of AI, with recent news tending to show that training data-sets included works protected by intellectual property laws…

Practical Applications for Geeks

Use in Web Development and Programming

In the field of web development and programming, Open Chat GPT proves to be a valuable assistant. It can help with automatic code generation, detection and resolution of programming problems, and even project documentation. Developers use it to get code suggestions, explanations on specific functions, or to optimize existing algorithms.

Moreover, Microsoft didn’t take long to follow the AI generative path for developers, with the creation of Copilot, an AI working on Github to generate functions, propose bug resolutions, do autocompletion, etc.

The service costs €10 per month and is TOTALLY worth it, as it saves several hours of work per month, even working passively: you’ll occasionally see code suggestions appear on screen, based either on what you’ve written before, or on what others before you have done on their own projects.

Its ability to understand and produce code in different programming languages makes it a versatile and efficient tool for accelerating project development: I’ll summarize by quoting a friend, who perfectly sums up the situation.

“Whether you take your code from Copilot or from Stack Overflow, the only difference is the time you spent looking for it…”

Brice de Miramice

Applications in Writing, Marketing, and SEO

Open Chat GPT also transforms the way content is created in writing, marketing, and SEO. For writers and marketing specialists, it offers valuable help for generating content ideas, writing drafts, and even creating engaging content adapted to different audiences.

In SEO, as long as you take the time to give it many resources to analyze (a good search volume extraction on a hundred keywords), it can analyze search trends, suggest relevant keywords, and help optimize texts to improve their visibility on search engines.

Admittedly, it’ll require a prompt that will hurt Open AI’s servers, in addition to asking it to crawl all the pages you want to analyze, but it’s possible.

However, there are already other tools that do this very well, like the excellent Yourtext.guru (shout-out to the Peyronnet brothers), which, in addition to analyzing the SERP, will allow you to optimize your texts in a radically more precise way than Chat GPT (but I digress).

Another approach related to SEO, for which Open Chat GTP will make a real difference, is creating content marketing campaigns: creating a relevant editorial calendar will now only take a few minutes.

Examples in Education and Research

The impact of Open Chat GPT in education and research is equally significant. It facilitates personalized learning by providing explanations adapted to each learner’s level. It can be used to create innovative teaching materials, while students use it to understand complex concepts and for homework help.

In research, Open Chat GPT can help analyze data, write scientific articles, and synthesize information from various sources, making the research process more efficient and accessible.

There are also specialized tools for this (Search IQ, Content AI).

Strategies to Maximize Efficiency

Tips for Formulating Effective Queries

On YouTube or LinkedIn, you’ll find dozens of influencers all claiming to have “the ultimate prompt” for OpenChat GPT. I’ve spent the last 6 months on the tool, always within reach, either via browser, Triplo, or Voilà (yes, I’ve splashed a lot of money on AI tools recently).

And actually, my conclusion is that there is NO ultimate prompt. However, there are best practices. Here are some tips:

1. Be precise and clear: Precise questions lead to precise answers. Avoid ambiguities and give clear context so the AI can understand the intention behind the query.
2. Use relevant keywords: Include specific keywords to quickly identify the essence of your request.
3. Ask open-ended questions for creative ideas: For idea generation or problem-solving, open-ended questions can encourage more innovative and varied responses.
4. Be open to surprises: Sometimes, Open Chat GPT’s responses can offer unexpected perspectives. Be open to these discoveries.
5. Try to “set milestones”: Structure your prompt logically, going from general to specific.
6. Structure your prompt: using tags like markdown will allow you to structure your query, thus giving valuable information about what you expect as output
7. Be demanding and directive: Don’t hesitate to ask for a very precise response model. Giving an output example will in most cases allow you to get something that meets your expectations.

The Ultimate Prompt for Open Chat GPT

No, I’m kidding, there’s no ultimate prompt for this OpenAI tool. However, there is indeed a prompt structure I recommend, which works very well:

You will act as [Sought expertise].
[Description of need]
[Contextualization info and your work environment]
[Description of task to execute]
Your output format must be [Desired format or destination software]

Which could give for example:

You will act as a web developer expert in JS
I'm on Astro, and I need to create a slider with swiper JS
I'm on visual studio, the plugin is installed on Astro, and I use Tailwind CSS
Create me a slider for 3 slides (you'll put demo photos), there must be only one visible slide, autoplay must be active, it must loop and I want navigation bullets
Your output format must be text. Give me the HTML code, JS code and CSS code (use TailWind utility classes). You'll put comments for the JS part to explain the arguments you used in the function.

If you use this structure, it’ll do the job in 99% of use cases.

How to Integrate Open Chat GPT into Existing Workflows

Okay, now that we have good basics, let’s see how to integrate Open Chat GPT into existing workflows.

1. Identify key areas: Detect processes that can be improved through AI, such as customer response automation or content generation. Make an estimate of implementation cost, and try to measure mid-term productivity gains.
2. Training and adaptation: After a conclusive test phase on a small scale, set up a standard production model and train your teams in its use. If everything goes well, you’ll see your productivity explode.
3. Intelligent automation: Look for ways to automate as many processes as possible using the workflow you’ve defined. Very often, if everyone can do it, a machine can do it (we’ll talk about this again).

Avoid Common Mistakes and Pitfalls

Using Open Chat GPT is not without challenges, and you’ll sooner or later encounter a tile that can fuel AI detractors’ speeches. Here’s how to avoid common mistakes:

Watch Out for Excessive Dependence

Don’t rely entirely on AI. Use it as a complementary tool rather than a single solution. I particularly verified this in code: when Chat GPT crashes, it crashes beautifully, and it may “loop” on an error. Don’t think that AI will replace a developer, and that you can start from “nothing” to perform complex tasks!

I saw it a lot when I rebuilt the site you’re on thanks to the Astro Framework: I always take malicious pleasure in explaining to my students that I’m practically self-taught, and that I know absolutely nothing about Javascript (it’s partly true), but I still have sufficient basics to recognize a big mistake when AI offers it to me. And fortunately, otherwise, given the number of blunders it sent me this summer, I would never have made it.

Chat GPT is a learned parrot with excellent memory, sure. But it doesn’t know everything, and beyond the mistakes it can make, you also have to add the mistakes that YOU will make it commit. Sometimes you need to step back from your prompt or technical approach to see that AI can lock itself into erroneous reasoning.

Neglecting Personalization

Personalize AI responses to match your brand or communication tone. For a very simple reason: text written by AI has a particular “feeling”. And if AI-written content detection algorithms aren’t yet perfect, most of the time, the reader’s instinct is worth all the detectors in the world.

Go chat 5 minutes with Nova, and you’ll see that, even if she has humor, she’ll always remain fixed on her objective: getting you into a conversion funnel. Her jokes, personality, and casualness are mainly there to humanize the conversation and maintain visitor engagement, but she remains an AI.

Ignoring Updates and Improvements

Stay informed about the latest Open Chat GPT updates to fully benefit from its improved capabilities: for example, the latest version 4 (in preview for developers, at the time I’m writing these lines), if it can process much more information, costs three to four times less in tokens than the previous version.

So you need to follow the news to stay in the race (and save money).

Open Chat GPT and Future Development

Overview of Recent and Future Developments in AI

If there’s one sector that moves fast, very, very fast, it’s AI. Everyone’s getting into it. Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, soon GAFAM + Magnificent 7 will all have generative AI, or an associated tool. The future promises advances in autonomous machine learning, allowing AI models to adapt and learn more efficiently without human intervention (for better and for worse, once again).

Moreover, the emphasis on creating more ethical and transparent AI is becoming a priority, given the ongoing lawsuits, and it’s also quite likely that Bot use will be “nerfed” to be more accessible to the general public.

Implications for Professionals and Businesses

For professionals and businesses, all this creates new opportunities and new challenges. Companies must adapt to integrate these technologies into their operations, which can lead to significant improvement in efficiency and service personalization.

This also implies a need for professionals to continuously train on these technologies to remain competitive (my story about the moving train). Additionally, companies must be ready to address the ethical and privacy issues that accompany the use of advanced AIs.

To put it another way, not getting into it means starting with a bullet in the foot.

The productivity gain is enormous, I experience it daily, and don’t plan to separate from the plethora of tools I’ve equipped myself with since June (I now count 20 tools I use regularly that are connected to OpenAI’s API).

Reflections on Ethics and Social Impact

Okay, that’s all very well, but… What about the impact on… Everything? Technical progress is a merciless steamroller, and each innovation doesn’t come without more or less negative repercussions on its environment. It’s therefore essential to consider how these technologies affect the job market, individual privacy, and information dissemination.

Creating regulatory and ethical frameworks to guide AI use is crucial to ensure these technologies benefit society as a whole, while minimizing potential risks. This includes developing standards to prevent bias in AI, protect data privacy, and guarantee responsible and transparent use of these technologies. Several scientists have already called for a moratorium on AI use, web editors are in trouble, and the list should continue to grow.

We’re talking about technological disruption, and we’re only in its infancy…

Conclusion

You have no choice: you must get into it. There. That’s my opinion, and it only engages me, but know that I really had a mega-boost since I got into it. I work better, faster, and I’m less tired.

However, be aware that, for now, it will never replace real expertise, and there’s always a way to make mistakes if you trust OpenAI too much: we’re still very far from generalized artificial intelligence, and OpenChat GTP is for now only a (very beautiful) tool.