“A few months ago, my colleagues Cade Metz and Kevin Roose explained the inner
workings of A.I., including chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT,
Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s Bard. Now we’re back with a new mission: to help
you learn to use A.I. to its full potential.
People from all walks of life —
students, coders, artists and accountants — are experimenting with how to use
A.I. tools. Employers are posting jobs seeking people who are adept at using
them. Pretty soon, if not already, you’ll have the chance to use A.I. to
streamline and improve your work and personal life.
As The Times’s personal tech
columnist, I’m here to help you figure out how to use these tools safely and
responsibly to improve many parts of your life.
I’m going to spend today’s
newsletter talking about two general approaches that will be useful in a number
of situations.
Then, in the coming weeks, I’ll give
you more specific tips for different aspects of your life, including parenting
and family life, work, organizing in your personal life, learning/education, creativity,
and shopping.
A few common-sense warnings to
start:
The
golden prompts
ChatGPT, Bing and Bard are among the most popular A.I. chatbots.
(To use ChatGPT, you’ll need to create an OpenAI account, and it requires a
subscription for its most advanced version. Bing requires you to use
Microsoft’s Edge web browser. Bard requires a Google account.)
Though they look simple to use — you
type something in a box and get answers! — asking questions in the wrong way
will produce generic, unhelpful and, sometimes, downright incorrect answers.
It turns out there’s an art to
typing in the precise words and framing to generate the most helpful answers. I
call these the golden prompts.
The people who are getting the most
out of the chatbots have been using variants of these strategies:
“Act as if.” Beginning your prompt with these magic words will instruct
the bot to emulate an expert. For example, typing “Act as if you are a tutor
for the SATs” or “Act as if you are a personal trainer” will guide the bots to
model themselves around people in those professions.
These prompts provide additional
context for the A.I. to generate its response. The A.I. doesn’t actually
understand what it means to be a tutor or a personal trainer. Instead, the
prompt is helping the A.I. to draw on specific statistical patterns in its
training data.
A weak prompt with no guidance will
generate less helpful results. If all you type is “What should I eat this
week?” the chatbot will come up with a generic list of meals for a balanced
diet, such as turkey stir fry with a side of colorful veggies for dinner
(which, to me, sounds very “meh”).
“Tell me what else you need to do
this.” To get results that are more
personalized — for example, health advice for your specific body type or
medical conditions — invite the bot to request more information.
In the personal trainer example, a prompt could be: “Act as
if you are my personal trainer. Create a weekly workout regimen and meal plan
for me. Tell me what else you need to do this.” The bot might then ask you for
your age, height, weight, dietary restrictions and health goals to tailor a
weeklong meal plan and fitness routine for you.
If you don’t get good answers on
your first try, don’t give up right away. Better yet, in the words of Ethan
Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, treat the bot as if it were a
human intern: “When it makes a mistake, point that out and ask for
it to do better.” Be forgiving and patient, and you’re likely to get better
results.
Thread
your chatbot conversations
After you get the hang of prompts,
you can make your chatbot more helpful over time. The key here is to avoid
treating your chatbot as a web search and starting with a fresh query each
time. Instead, keep several threads of conversations open and add to them over
time.
This strategy is easiest with ChatGPT. Bing requires you to
reset your conversations periodically, and Bard does not make it as easy to hop
between conversation threads.
Natalie Choprasert, an entrepreneur
in Sydney, Australia, who advises companies on how to use A.I., uses ChatGPT as
a business coach and an executive assistant. She keeps separate conversations
running side by side for each of these roles.
For the business coach thread, she
shares insights about her professional background and the company’s goals and
problems. For the executive assistant thread, she shares scheduling
information, like the clients she’s meeting with.
“It builds up and trains properly,
so when I ask it a question later on, it will be in the right context and it
will give me answers close to what I’m looking for,” Choprasert said.
She shared a bonus golden prompt that has trained her
assistants to be extra helpful: Apply a framework. She recently read
“Clockwork,” a book about setting up a business. When she asked
ChatGPT-the-business-coach to offer advice using the framework of “Clockwork,”
she was delighted to see that it could incorporate principles from the book
into an action plan for expanding her company.”
