I have written about ChatGPT before, and have been playing with its capabilities for a while now – I’ve also tested many similar tools such as Jasper.ai, Articleforge, Copy.ai, as well as tools with different purposes like DALL-E for image generation. Here are some incredible uses of ChatGPT!
Writing personalized email
The key to getting a personalized response is providing context during your request. The more information that ChatGPT has, the more comprehensive and personalized the response will be.
Once ChatGPT has generated a response to your prompt, you can provide it more information to further enhance the response generated.
You can then fine tune your result either within ChatGPT or by hand to get the perfect email, every time!
Using ChatGPT to explain things
Sometimes you just want to find information and searching on Google either isn’t giving you the result or you’ve found the result and it’s a long article that could take a while to read. ChatGPT in many cases is an easy access replacement to Wikipedia and search engines – and often does a better job of explaining the subject, with instant access to answers for follow up questions.
This works well for widely known information, however the more specific or niche your prompt, the more chance that your response may contain hallucinations – a phenomenon where an artificial intelligence model generates an image, audio, or other type of output that does not correspond to a real world object or event. In some instances, where there are several similarly named objects or events to draw upon, the model may conflate these references resulting in unexpected responses.
Or using ChatGPT to summarise things
Say that you’ve found a long article that could take a while to read, you can prompt ChatGPT to summarise the article by typing in “Summarise this article: ” and then pasting in a copy of the text from the article and pressing enter. This will write up a brief summary of the article for you.
Using ChatGPT to generate STL files for 3D printing
Andrew Sink from 3DWithUs.com has written an article detailing how to use ChatGPT to generate STL files for 3D printing. An STL file represents 3D models as a series of triangles. It is commonly used in 3D printing and computer-aided design (CAD) applications for the exchange of 3D data between different platforms and tools. STL files are small and easy to manipulate, making them ideal for use in many different industries and applications, including product design, prototyping, engineering, and manufacturing.
In Andrew’s article he discusses how to prompt ChatGPT to generate shapes and output the contents of an STL file, which you can then save to your 3D printer for printing.
You would then generate the code for the additional faces of the cube, and paste it all into a file and name it as an STL file before sending it to your 3D printer.
Using ChatGPT in software development
Santiago discusses several methods that ChatGPT can aid in software development. I have also been using ChatGPT for scaffolding new functions I’m writing and adding comments. I’ve also found it exceptionally useful for getting quick documentation and examples on public functions. To summarise Santiago’s list;
- Explaining code – “What is this function doing?”
- Improve existing code
- Rewriting code to conform with coding standards or styles
- Simplifying code
- Documenting code
- Writing test cases
- Translating code between languages
- Exploring alternative implementations
- Scaffolding new code
It’s great to see a comprehensive list of uses and I’m certainly going to try out more of these. Santiago’s article goes into more detail for each use case, if you are involved in any software development this list is definitely worth checking out!
Scaffolding in general
Scaffolding was mentioned as a use during software development, but using ChatGPT to scaffold any project is extremely useful and can save a lot of time. This is probably my main use of ChatGPT to date, taking the AI generated content as the framework to rapidly progress ideas.
Whether you need to create a PowerPoint presentation, documentation or write an essay on a particular topic – ChatGPT can provide you with the major talking points. All you have to do is ask!