📖 My Guide to Using ChatGPT

Issue 31 — Technology

Artificial Intelligence is gaining a lot of traction in the technology world, especially in recent months. Leading all this hype is OpenAI, into which Microsoft invested 10 billion dollars, integrating OpenAI services into Microsoft products. However, there are many traps that we are prone to falling into and misusing. In this guide, we’ll go through the steps to use ChatGPT and how to use it as a tool. Make sure to like, share, and subscribe!

Getting Started

In this section, I’ll show you the steps on how to get started using ChatGPT. I’d recommend that you do these steps on a computer, as you’ll be able to interact with more features, but a phone works as well.

1. The first thing that you’ll need to do is to open your browser and go to “openai.com” (link to the page).
2. You’ll then go to “product” in the menu bar and click on it to uncover a drop-down menu. Here you will click “overview” (link to the page).
3. Next, scroll down to the ChatGPT section and push “Try ChatGPT” (link to the page)
4. Here you will be prompted to either login or sign up, so pick whichever one suits your needs. Sometimes you may not be able to get to this step due to high traffic, but this is unlikely. However, if it does happen, try again at a different time.

By following these steps, you will then be able to access ChatGPT. You will see some suggestions at the top, like questions you can ask, the capabilities of the chatbot, and the limitations. In the desktop view, there will be a ribbon on the left that holds some functionality. On phone view, this can be opened by pressing the three lines at the top. The ribbon starts with your chat history, and below that is the clear conversations button. Under that is an upgrade button that allows you to subscribe to the service. Benefits of subscribing include access when demand is high, faster response speed, and priority access to new features. Below, this button is what appearance you want (light/dark mode). Beneath that is an “Updates and FAQ” button, which will take you to a page where you can learn more. Lastly of course, there is the logout button.

Under the suggestions, there will be a bar with a paper airplane-like icon where you can type whatever you want. When done typing, you can push the airplane icon. To stop generating a response, you can press the “stop generating” button above the text field on a desktop, or the square icon on a mobile.

Microsoft will eventually be releasing its own version of this into Microsoft Bing. The way to access Bing is: go to “bing.com”, search for something, and click the chat button under the text field. It is currently in the beta testing phase right now, but it should come out soon!

How to Utilize

ChatGPT can answer any question as long as it’s not related to recent events/ideas, as the chatbot is only versed on data before the year 2021. In other words, if you ask the chatbot for last night’s basketball game score, it’s not going to work well. Another limitation ChatGPT has is its lack of emotions or feelings. Since it’s AI-modeled, it doesn’t fully simulate a real person and doesn’t have a personality at all. Instead, it’s just there to assist you when needed. If you ask it something like “what’s your favorite color” it’s going to say something like this:

You should think of ChatGPT or Bing Chat as your “copilot to the internet,” as Microsoft likes to put it. At the end of the day, these two services are just AI-based tools. They form sentences that make sense, and they don’t do any fact-checking. So it’s very possible you could be getting random or false information from these chatbots. This is why Microsoft calls it a copilot. For example, if you ask something like “what smartphones have the best cameras,” ChatGPT may provide camera info for some phones, but some of the information may not be true. The information may seem okay to a person who isn’t familiar with cameras, but people who are more knowledgeable about the subject can tell if something is incorrect. This is okay for small niche things about fact-checking, but currently, I don’t think this would work very well for something like meal planning if you have allergies, or finding a lotion with a certain ingredient.

The main point here is that, at this point, you shouldn’t solely rely on these AI models because it isn’t guaranteed that what they are saying is correct. You can use these models to get started with an idea or question, but when making an important decision, or when you need true facts, you should probably conduct research in addition to using ChatGPT.

How NOT to Utilize

Just like all internet tools, these chatbots should only be used for good, and not for bad. ChatGPT and Bing shouldn’t be used as an easy exit for writing an email/report for your boss, or an essay for school. Doing this is not going to be beneficial for you, since you’re not gaining or learning anything–except maybe an extra couple of minutes. Try it! You can ask it to “write me an essay on global warming” or something like that. It will produce a couple of paragraphs full of info that could seem legitimate. This shouldn’t be used to submit because one, nothing is fact-checked, and (2) in my experience, ChatGPT either uses extremely simple or complicated language, so your teacher may know that you didn’t write it.

You can use these AI chatbots to provide outlines for what you’re doing. You could ask one of these chatbots to write the structure for your essay, yet you write the actual meat of it. So in this case, you’re just using the bot to help you generate ideas and get into a flow.

For businesses, I think ChatGPT is a great tool, but the main environment in which I see this technology being abused is in the education field. At this point in time, ChatGPT is easily accessible and free to use. Anybody can use it, and opportunistic kids will see this as a great way to skip their homework in exchange for a more enjoyable activity. ChatGPT can already answer questions, write essays, and find answers to math problems, all while doing it in a legitimate way. The technology is so advanced that it could possibly even fool teachers. I think that these chatbots have to, and will be, regulated in the near future. A student could go to a very prestigious private school and use ChatGPT for all their homework to receive high grades up until 12th grade. Then when it’s time to take the SAT or ACT, their results won’t be looking very good, and this could hurt their future by not getting into a good college, etc. This also doesn’t benefit school districts, as they need to have good ratings for parents to send their kids there, since what type of college the student gets into affects the district’s rating.

Obviously, schools can’t monitor each and every second of a student’s life, and I think that the school needs to find a way to embrace this technology so that it benefits everyone. A way where if kids use ChatGPT, it’s not considered cheating, but a tool to help them.

Overall, that’s my guide to ChatGPT.I hope you learned something about it. Make sure to play around with it, because it may be fun to see what kind of answer it spits out Thanks for reading this article and I’ll talk to you next week!

— Luke Rapaka

Acknowledgments: Thank you to my friend Sharvi Shah for helping me edit this article! (LinkedIn Profile)