|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
All aboard!
First, there is no need to be at the cutting edge of your industry or profession to be working on AI or learn How to use chatGPT.
Second, you’ve probably already heard the term ChatGPT if you’re not using it already yourself.
Third, Impress your kids with your newfound knowledge 😉
Late in 2022, businesses of all sizes and individuals started talking about how this easily accessible conversational-type AI really was and how it would change work as we knew it.
For real, this time.
ChatGPT has burst into public consciousness by making it much easier for anyone to use it and see its potential. Use cases have been making headlines for better and for worse.
The why now is simple. Until a few weeks ago (at the time of this writing), chatGPT was stuck in 2021. The knowledge it had to answer your questions, create your content, and analyze your problems was limited to, at best early to mid-2021. It knew nothing about anything else that happened or was published after that.
The WHY NOW is precisely that, new plugins and releases of chatGPT and other like-minded tools make it possible to access anything that you can give it as a reference:
- A new web article
- An internal PDF
- Import your sales data
- An image to review
This makes it even more important for you and your business to experiment with these tools to see where they can be applied, understand their limitations and make work… more enjoyable and less repetitive.
Why learn How to use chatGPT now?
Simply put, AI and chatGPT-like tools went from being a D minus student in most subject areas in 2021 to B, going from version 3 to 3.5 in early 2023. Now, in mid-2023 with v4, we are at the A minus level…
Why? Well, the models and technology got better. Still, it can now be fed new data and documents to include in its thought process to solve your problem or create that document you need.
You and your business inherited a teammate, a Master’s degree intern… use it or lose it. Up to you.
Productivity gains
Something big is going on here.
To give you context, the change in productivity when an American plant added steam power in the 1800s was about 25% in productivity. These are very big numbers in an initial pass at implementing a new process or technology; it’s not just anecdotal.
Now we have data that suggests that something way bigger is happening. To demonstrate, I’ll explain how I started using conversational tools like ChatGPT.
Examples of experiments on How to use chatGPT
The obvious ones for me are computer code and writing documents, which combine the two things I do most, hence this article.
Writing code: chatGPT is helping me daily to write code snippets, review code, and correct code, which used to take hours each, and now takes minutes. Think about that for a second. This, in turn, frees me up to do more complex and valuable business analysis with clients and put more work into internal automation, also reducing our team’s hours spent on repetitive tasks.
Writing text: I can now research, outline, and summarize drafts review/summarize 200-300% faster. I still do the actual writing, but the before and after time spent to make it more compelling, more accurate, and correct makes the process of putting an idea into words, a proposal together, and a project summary to a client much more enjoyable since the bulk of my time is spent on the part that I add the most value.
Process development: When we need a project plan, a concise publishing process, to write an SOP for a given task or deliverable, collaboration with AI makes the output in the wide majority of cases much more complete, and we get around to doing them since we know that it will be innovative with our help and get done fast with chatGPT’s help. Again this now takes me minutes instead of hours to do.
Early adoption in business
Since there is no clear, measurable benefit to using it at scale yet, the earliest adoption of conventional AI like chatGPT is done by people and not companies as a whole.
That being said, there will be more and more formalized corporate organizational use when you can predict a measurable performance difference of 30% to 80% on someone’s time.
I guarantee you that there are secret users of ChatGPT in every company, who have cut their work by more than two-thirds and simply don’t want to tell anyone about it. I hear examples all the time about this in all skill areas, from creative to technical to planning and reporting spheres.
100s of millions of users in just a few weeks. It remains a feat that should get your attention as a business owner. You should have a primary and even intermediate understanding of what it can do WITH you. There is no absolute need to know how it works, the data and learning sciences behind it, to extract huge benefits from learning how to use it and be familiar with its progress.
For example, this is the main drive behind JustAking.ai; we want to extract the “need to know” essential for business owners so they can have an understanding of the capabilities of AI in their business, not because it can generate awesome images of you as a Barbie character (although that is always a bit fun).
Another reason is to dispel the fear of “it will take over my job” syndrome. It will. Mostly, it will take over the job from people and businesses that did not take the time to understand it from others that have learned to use and collaborate with it.
How to use chatGPT and experiment
That’s the fun part: On a lot of things.
Examples I have seen small business owners and employees try out:
- Write marketing material drafts
- Write proposal outlines
- Respond to sensitive questions, emails or questions
- Run meetings by writing the email and creating the calendar events
- Get image drafts or concepts
- Develops drafts for internal guides and SOPs
- Outline project plans
- Create checklists
- Make internal memos
- Transcribe meeting recordings into notes and tasks, create the email and calendar for followup
- Translate training and product videos in many languages with captions
- Create onboarding videos from text with AI personae and voice
- Summarize videos and audio into text
- Summarize large PDF documents, annual filings
- And so on and so on
The point is, when you start with basic problem framing like “Summarize this text in an informal tone as a marketing specialist with 20 years of experience in manufacturing B2B“, also called a PROMPT, you as the subject matter expert, with your unique skills will start to think more and more in terms of how do I frame a problem into a question/prompt to the AI and iterate with it (collaborate) to get it solved.
What are Prompts, and Where can I go to try this out
So let’s try it out!
I asked chatGPT to help me out with this part of the article with this prompt:
Acting as an AI business consultant, explain what a "prompt" is to a small business owner. List some examples of prompts that a small business owner would write to help him in his daily tasks. Include URLs where he could try out some prompts with conversational Ai tools. Write in an informal tone, and the output should be fully markdown.The answer was:
A “prompt” in the context of AI is essentially a question, command, or statement that you feed into an AI model to guide its responses. You could say it’s a bit like a conversation starter or a way to nudge the AI in a specific direction. It helps to instruct the AI on what you want it to do. This could be anything from generating an email draft, to creating a list, to answering a question, and more.
So, as a small business owner, you can use prompts to automate and simplify some of your daily tasks. Let’s say you run a local coffee shop. Here are a few examples of prompts you could use:
- “Draft an email to a supplier asking for a price quotation for 100 pounds of Brazilian coffee beans.” This could help you get a basic draft ready, which you can then fine-tune to your liking.
- “Generate a list of marketing strategies for a small coffee shop.” Here, AI can give you some fresh ideas on how to promote your business.
- “Create a schedule for employee shifts for the next week, considering we are open from 8 am to 8 pm and have 6 employees.” This prompt could help you quickly generate a shift schedule.
- “What are the best practices for inventory management in a coffee shop?” With this prompt, you can get some advice or pointers on managing your stock.
Remember, you can customize these prompts to suit your specific business needs.
As for where to try out these prompts, there are a couple of tools you can use:
- OpenAI’s ChatGPT: This is a fantastic tool to enter your prompts and see the responses from OpenAI’s advanced language model. (chat.openai.com)
- Bard by Google: your creative and helpful collaborator, here to supercharge your imagination, boost your productivity and bring your ideas to life. (https://bard.google.com) – US only at the time of this writing.
- Poe.com: is an interface to multiple AI models like Claude, Palm, chatGPT
- Bing: integrated into Microsoft’s newest browser, Edge, you can now converse with Bing instead of doing traditional searching.
All of these platforms will give you a feel of how AI language models respond to different prompts.
This took 20 seconds to write the prompt and 30 seconds for me to add Bard, Poe and Bing since I used no plugin with my prompt, so chatGPT did not “know” about those other tools.
Also, if I were to integrate this content for real in an article, I would use the ideas presented, have it rewritten using more my tone or style or writing I defined with the AI, and review this with peers.
Food for thought – “Use at your own risk”.
Hallucinations
Suppose you use an AI tool to manage your inventory and predict what food supplies you need to order based on past data. The AI analyzes your sales history and “hallucinates” that you need a massive amount of tomatoes next week because you’ve sold a lot of tomato-based dishes recently.
However, what the AI didn’t consider was a local event that happened last week which spiked your sales – a one-off tomato festival that won’t be repeated.
As a result, you end up with a mountain of tomatoes you can’t use before they go bad. This shows how AI “hallucinations” can sometimes miss the context or not understand one-time events, leading to incorrect predictions. It’s why you should consider your interaction with AI as a collaboration and not an outsourcing deal; You need to have a human eye review AI recommendations.
You Are What You Read (or Train On)
AI is a bit like a sponge. It absorbs everything you throw at it. Feed it great content, and it’ll churn out great content. Feed it garbage, and well… 🤢 … you get the picture.
AI learns from the internet, and, well, the internet is a very large mixed bag. You’ve got your educational articles and inspirational quotes, but there’s also misinformation, bias, and a whole lot of nonsense. And the AI doesn’t know the difference unless you train it to recognize it.
So, if you’re gonna use AI in your business, remember that you’re accountable for what it says or does. If it spouts some crazy conspiracy theory, that’s on you. So always be careful and review its output.
Deepfakes and Chatbots: Ethics
Now let’s get into the real sci-fi stuff: deepfakes. These images or videos have been manipulated to make it look like someone did or said something they didn’t. And with advanced AI, these deepfakes can be disturbingly convincing.
Then you’ve got chatbots, which can be programmed to seem so lifelike, you’d think you were chatting with a real person. It’s pretty cool, but it can also be rather deceptive.
Be you, be smart and use responsibly.
As a business owner, you must use these technologies ethically. Don’t trick people into thinking they’re interacting with a human when they’re not. And don’t spread deepfakes that can damage reputations or spread falsehoods.
Like most new technology or good wine, it’s about using responsibly. They can be incredibly powerful, but like any tool, they can cause damage if misused. So, remember, “Use at your own risk!”
What next? I’d like to know How to use chatGPT.
We are currently writing a series of articles on each to provide you with the basics on how to use each one, with the links and our evaluation of what each is best at doing. We will also include midJourney for image creation (which made the images for most of our blog posts here at JustAsking.ai).
You can checkout related articles below.
Also coming out soon will be our Prompting guide: How to chat with AI guide for small businesses. It will be FREE for people who register prior to its release here.
Subscribe to our newsletter to get notified when those are ready to go!
