← The ChatGPT Experiment - Simplifying AI For Curious Beginners
The ChatGPT Experiment - Simplifying AI For Curious Beginners
Ep 82 - ChatGPT: Listener Questions
00:30:03
Episode Summary: In this solo episode, host Cary Weston dives into a batch of real listener questions submitted through the podcast’s website. He shares his perspective, tips, and best practices for using ChatGPT effectively—covering everything...
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Hey there. Welcome to the ChatGPT experiment. This is a podcast designed to help you better understand just what ChatGPT is, what it can do, and perhaps how you can get some benefit, either personally or professionally from it. My name is Kerry Weston. I am your host and I'm glad you're with me. Hey, today I am going to go through a few of the questions that have come in through the website. I have some guides and perhaps you've downloaded one or two before. And when I have folks download a guide, I just ask a question. What's top of mind? Anything you got that you'd like to know, like to ask. So once in a while I like to go through all because it certainly helps me get topics and talk about relevant and meaningful things. But today what I thought I'd do, I think I grabbed six or seven here and I'll just read them specifically to you and then I'll just talk out loud and give you my thoughts on how I see it coming. Now look, there's no gospel, there's no right or wrong, there's no hundred percent anything here. So all I'm going to do, like I've said before, I just like to share what I've done, maybe my perspective, if I've made mistakes or found anything beneficial. So I'm just going to tell you from my perspective how I've approached it, what I think might work best for you. But again, you're going to hear me say this, and you have heard me say this time and time again, your own curiosity, right? Following the best practices that I share with you is the best way for you to get what you are going to benefit from the most, I think from ChatGPT. Now, here's the irony. If you are thinking of sending me a question, paste it into ChatGPT first. The. I would say the best teacher of ChatGPT oftentimes is ChatGPT itself. Do you have. I've got three kids, I've said before, and the girls, I don't remember, I don't remember Spencer doing this, but I remember the girls doing this. I remember Maddie and Serena doing this. Especially in like the second, third grade range. They would like to play teacher at home, right? They'd spend all day paying attention and being respectful and doing their work and following the rules. And they loved to play classroom. They wanted to be the boss, right? They wanted to call the shots. And not in a mean way, but they wanted to be that person. They wanted to be the authority figure, they wanted to be the teacher. They looked up to their teachers as we all did, and they wanted to do that. That was some of their playtime, was being a teacher. I share that because ChatGPT has a couple different roles that it can play and one is kind of that doer for you, right? That partner, the intern. I've talked about the taskmaster, but it also has a teacher mentality to it. Let me explain. When I ask it and give it background, this is what I need and this is what I will work on. And. And I'm driving the bus, right? You've heard me say before, working with it or having it work with me and not for me, right? And so I will share with it what I need, give it some background, what success looks like, give it the parameters, narrow the band, all the things that I talk about, and then it gives me output and I'll go back and forth and revise and revise and revise. And in that role, it's a taskmaster for me, right? It's doing things that I'm asking it to do. But sometimes I'll flip the script and I will say, hey, this is what you gave me. Okay, Now I need you to take a look at this. If I'm going to use this output to get the best I possibly can, I want you to analyze your own work and I want you to tell me how you would change this, which path you would take, what details you would modify, what you'd add, what you take away, how are you going to do the best work? I need you to come up with something that I can give to ChatGPT to get the best work out of it. For the work that I'm doing now, I will actually talk to ChatGPT as if it's not ChatGPT, if that makes any sense. I will tell it. I am going to use this with CHAT GPT, and I need you to give me the most detailed prompt, instructions, whatever it is possible, so that ChatGPT will do their best work. And it'll almost leave its body for a minute, right? And we hover over it. It doesn't know it's chatgpt at that moment. And then it says, great, here's what you can give to ChatGPT. And it becomes the teacher, like, it becomes the taskmaster strategist that's creating instructions for ChatGPT. So I share all that to tell you this. If you have a question, literally just paste it into ChatGPT. How can I do this? How. Where would I go? This. Which options would I have? Or how could you help me here? Okay. And you're going to be amazed. I've told you. The three words that I love to use with ChatGPT is tell me more. Right? Tell me more. So ask it a question, and when it gives you the answer, dig in. Tell me more about that. Tell me more about this, and I think you'll be fascinated. Personal note. I told you last week, Serena Bell's got her first job. She's earning her own money, and today when I went out for some errands, I stopped in and embarrassed her, as a good dad's supposed to do. So I went to the counter and waited for her to wait on me and of course, made sure that everybody in the bakery knew that her dad was at the counter. So kudos to. Kudos to me for being able to embarrass my daughter in her workplace. I think that's a rite of passage, right? I think we're all supposed to be doing that one way or another. We have to get that in. There's only so many chances we get to have fun like that. Right? All right, so let's. Oh, yeah, first time. ChatGPT experiment.com is the website of the podcast, and there are guides and prompts and resources in the menu. You'll see under training, you'll see there are workshops that I offer for businesses and for conferences and for individuals, but you'll also see guides and prompts. You'll also see guides and prompts. In that last option, Guides and Prompts is a page of things that I have used over the years that has gotten me some great results and I want to share them with you so you can use them. In fact, some of those are going to be answers for the questions I'm going to read off today. But the ability for you to take what I've learned before and modify them and make it better is on that page. Under training, you're going to see guides and prompts. And also under training there's listener questions and there's a few. There's a few listener questions that I put on there along with some answers and links and resource that you can, that you can dig into. So let's get to, let's get to a few of the letters that have come in. Yeah, so the first one is from Caprio. And the question is, what are the disadvantages of using ChatGPT? Interesting question. And a week ago I probably would have had a different answer. But one day this morning in a newsletter that I get in the morning, I get the Morning Brew. I don't know if any of you get the Morning Brew newsletter. I love it. It's a good little summary with a little sense of humor and. But one of their side newsletters is called Tech Brew. And one of the articles that was in Tech Brew was talking about, I think it was an MIT study talking about how people become reliant on AI. I don't know if it was ChatGPT specifically, but it was AI. And I think one of the resources, or maybe it was a study out of Poland, it was a doctor, but whatnot. You'll get the gist. It was they measured the outcome of analysis three or six months before implementing an AI solution. And then they measured the output and analysis of whatever metric they were measuring six months after they took AI away. Right. So they had a, a pre AI sample, an AI sample, and then the same work post AI, I guess they took the AI away and they found what they call people that they were surveying. They said lazier, right? I don't know if that's the right word or not. But they became more reliant on the artificial intelligence to the point where they took it away. They weren't doing as good a job as they were before the AI came. Right. And I want to ask you if you're like me when I travel, when I just made a family trip to Maryland and I relied, I relied on that Apple Maps or Google Maps. I relied on the blue line to tell me where to go. Right. I didn't give it a second thought. I didn't pay much attention to what was going around me unless that blue dot told me to pay attention to it. And so the blue dot I'm referring to or the blue line, forgive me, the blue line I'm referring to is the GPS line on the screen, right? That's the line I followed. It tells me what turn to make, when to take it, how long it's going to be, how long it's going to take to get there right when traffic is coming. Now I remember years and years ago, another lifetime ago, making a similar trip down to Virginia using paper maps and trip tickets from aaa. And it was a very, very different experience paying attention to everything around it. It was very manual. And GPS now has gotten us to the point where I say we're just follow the blue line. If you took that away from me, if you took the blue line away from me, I would be lost. So just like either the doctors or whoever they surveyed, if you took the technology away from me that I'm getting used to using, I would underperform as well. So what are the disadvantages of using ChatGPT? I think you can look at it two ways. It enables you to be more efficient and do something quicker, but you also stop processing and thinking and strategizing that you used to because you're now relying or using whatever level you're at a tool to do that for you. So I kind of looked at that article that said that the, the physicians or the people they were surveying were being less strategic, using less of their brain and like I said, they were calling it more lazy. I think that was an adjective that probably wasn't necessary, but I think I would be too, I would be too if you took that blue line away from me. So Capril, I think one of the disadvantages, if that's how we want to classify it, is maybe an over reliance or a new reliance on utilizing a tool instead of your brain in a way that you had. But much like the computer and the calculator and all the things that have come, you know, through our lifetime. Not sure that you can make a case that it's all bad because I could tell you that I'm far more effective driving now than I would be panicked looking at trip tickets and paper maps. Right? So let's see. Noel is in digital marketing and Noel asks how do I make chatgpt sound exactly like me when I don't have any written content to train it on? I need a way of training ChatGPT to speak exactly like me. Noel, you're in luck. So on that menu that I told you about on the website. So under training and what did I call it? Resources. Right, under training, guides and prompts. So training guides and prompts. One of the marketing tools, there's a marketing set of tools and prompts there. And one of them is exactly that, how to create voice, tone and style. It's a quiz, it's a survey that you can literally copy and paste into ChatGPT. It will ask you questions, it will interview you and dependent on your answer. You know, it may have some follow up questions just to get clarifications, but it will ask you a series of questions and allow you to create a baseline set of attributes so you can have voice, tone and style attributes to feed into ChatGPT. Now, no, there's no better replacement or training mechanism than you just feeding your own writing to it, right? Or talking to it. But second to that are the attributes that you could have here from this starter quiz that will allow you to, to get those attributes right. So I would encourage you to do that as a baseline and then, you know, copy and paste the output of those attributes. You have it to use over and over again or even put it into your instructions, right, Your custom Instructions for your ChatGPT account as a whole. But then I would encourage you to keep going. I would keep feeding it the writing that you're doing so that it can learn specifics. It learns very, very well if you feed it actual specifics. You know, Rodrigo is also in marketing, head of marketing, it says. And the question Rodrigo has is how do I use deep research better in ChatGPT? Of course, that's the only question there. I don't have the context, Rodrigo, but here's what I would say is most of the time that I'm hearing people using deep research and they say I'm not getting what I think I should get out of it, is they probably need to follow a formula, the form, the same formula that I put in my custom jet custom GPT guide on the website. So if you go to the website and download the custom GPT guide right there on the homepage, you'll see that there's a three step formula of purpose, process and precision. Okay? And what this means is you can actually talk to ChatGPT and say, listen, I want to give ChatGPT deep research some instructions and let me give you some information. Again, let's go back to the amazing intern. You're asking somebody to understand you understand the purpose, the background, the goal, what success looks like and how they can be helpful. That's really what you're doing. And with Deep Research, what you're doing is you're saying, I'm going to delegate this task to you. And so if you think about it, if you were to delegate this task to a person, you would give them purpose, you would tell them maybe some process, and you would tell them precision, you would tell them what success looks like, right? So the same thing is here. So here's what I'd recommend, is download, Rodrigo, download that Chat GPT custom GPT guide on the homepage and follow the same Instructions. Talk to ChatGPT. Now, in this case, in the guide, it's going to say, I am, I'm talking to you because I want to create instructions for a custom GPT. But you could replace that, right? You could say, I want to create instructions for Deep Research. If you just swap that out, have the same conversation. This is what I'm looking to do, you know, this is why I'm doing it. These are some of the reasons or outcomes I'm looking to gain. This is what success looks like. This is why it's important. Could you create instructions for me again, back to the teacher mode, right? Could you create instructions for me that I could paste into Deep Research so I could get better value out of it? Rodrigo, I think if you follow that path of giving it some background, allowing it to understand your situation, why you're delegating it, why you're looking to do this and how it can be successful, you're going to find that your interaction with Deep Research is going to be, I would guess, much more valuable. Hope that's helpful. Tone or Tony. I'm going to guess it's Tony from Norway. Norway. She is a nurse or a business owner. I'm gonna say Tony's a nurse or a business owner. I don't know if that's a female or a male. Tony. So apology from Norway says, I'm a beginner on ChatGPT from Norway. I accidentally found your podcast. Well, I'm glad you found however you find us. Right. However you find the podcast. I'm glad you're here and absolutely love it. Well, thank you. I'm working on a book about the forest and its health benefits it's having on us. Cool. I find it hard to get ChatGPT to do what I want with my photos. Can you point me in the right direction? So, Tony, I'm going to say I don't know enough about what you're doing with the photos, so I will share this. There's two Guesses I have number one, either you're looking to modify or create new photos with ChatGPT, and in that case, I do have an episode that talks about images. And you can do color direction, you can give lens flare, you can get. There's a. It has a number of directions that you can copy and paste and use all kinds of combinations, soft and hard and black and white or whatever it is. There's a number of instructions that I've been able to pull out of ChatGPT for focal lens, for color, for style, you know, that kind of stuff. Tones, feels. And so if you're looking to create modify photos or images in ChatGPT, that guide will be helpful for you. It'll give you languages and prompts that you can use to get different outcomes of any images or photos that you're working with in ChatGPT. Now, if you are looking to do something with specific photos, such as I'm going to give you a photo and I want you to analyze it, then I would give you the same instructions that I just gave to Rodrigo. Is the more that you can explain what you're providing, what you're looking to do, what you'd like ChatGPT to do, what you're delegating and why, and then what success looks like, the more background you know, the more process, the more purpose that you can give, the more conversation you can give it, the more likely it knows what it's supposed to be doing and how it can help you the most. So I hope, I hope I was close with one of those two. Tony, if you want to write in and tell me I was, I was off and, and give me a little bit more detail, I'd be certainly happy to help you. But I was fascinated to learn all of the color and lens and tone, specific instructions and varieties that are available that ChatGPT knows. So if you want to take a look, there's a laundry list of art directions, like you say, camera directions, speed, tone, color, lens, feel, all that stuff. It's fascinating. You can play with all kinds of different, all kinds of different combinations. Jamie writes in Jamie's a marketing consultant. A lot of marketing people listen to the podcast the Marketing Consultant, and Jamie says, how do I get chatgpt to think like me? Okay, so this is not a silver bullet, Jamie, but I'll give you some best practices. The first thing I would say is, let's have a conversation with ChatGPT so it understands who you are and what you do. Okay? In fact, if you've been using ChatGPT for any time you know more than, more than a couple months. If you used it fairly regularly. What I'd ask you to do, and you might be surprised if you haven't done this yet, is literally ask it. ChatGPT, tell me what you know about me personally and professionally. Just give a simple prompt like that, Jamie, and see what it comes back with. If you've been using it fairly regularly, you're going to be very surprised at the things that it recognizes has picked up on knows about you. And some of it may be incorrect. And this is why you ask. If you can understand how ChatGPT is looking at you or sees you, then you can start to shape it and correct it. You can fill in the gaps. You can tell it this is incorrect. You can give it things it's missing, like me. You may be using it for clients, so it may confuse some of the stuff that are true for clients instead of being true for you. So you can correct it there. But that exercise, tell me what you know about me personally and professionally, will give you a list of attributes and understandings that ChatGPT has for you. And then what I would do is I would tweak it, I would give it what you want it and correct it and all that kind of stuff. That's your base. And then the second thing I would tell you is if you have anything that can be used to help understand what thinking like you means. Do you have articles that you've written about how you approach your work? Do you have blog posts? Do you have emails? Do you have anything that you've gotten out of your head that would help ChatGPT understand anything specific, professional, personal about you? Because it wants to mimic, okay, so first thing it's going to do is analyze to understand it, and then it wants to mimic it. So if you want ChatGPT to think like you, the best thing to do is to provide it some resources beyond its own understanding, like that prompt we just talked about. Give it some resources that helps it understand how you approach. Okay, so for instance, on my website I have articles about my marketing philosophies, my best practices, how I approach certain things, my, my rules. I actually have an article about rules. I have things that I've written about. This is how I approach, this is the, this is what I consider to be the most important, you know, the next important, that kind of thing. So I have a lot of things that I've written through the years that I have been able to feed to ChatGPT so they can Understand how I approach my work. You may have the same. If not, hey, listen again, just like I opened up the podcast with Jamie, once you have an understanding by asking it, what do you know about me personally or professionally? Do this. Have it be the interviewer review, right? Have it interview you. Literally say this. I need you to better understand me and then give it more context. I want you to understand how I think. I want you to understand how I approach my work. I want you to understand what I do on a regular basis. But don't stop there. Tell it. Why? Because I want you to be able to help me. I want to be able to do my work faster. I want to be more efficient. I want to have whatever it might be. So you give it the background and then help it understand why when you give it the what and the why and then combine it with the action. So interview me one question at a time. I would say one question at a time, Jamie, because it's going to give you a brain dump. And you want this to be a natural conversation, right? So you would never throw seven questions at somebody at once and expect them to remember an answer. So say, listen, I want you to better understand me. I want you to think like me. And to do that, I need you to get as much information from me as possible. Could you interview me? What questions do you need? Right. What questions do you need to ask? What questions do you need answered in order for you to start better understanding what I do, how I do it, so you can think like me and help me work? Okay, Jamie, I think you're going to be kind of fascinated when you do those two exercises to understand what it knows already and then find out how it can interview you to pull information out of your head. You're going to end up with some pretty fantastic attribute sets that I would copy and paste. Just as you know, a series of things that are true, I would copy and paste and put them into a document so you can use them later in different avenues, whether it's a new conversation or custom GPT. But I think that's the best way to go about getting it to think like you. All right, let's pull one more here, Joanna. Joanna is head of International sales. How can ChatGPT help a mom with a full time busy role successfully manage my family's schedule with children of three different schools and after school activities. Plan healthy home cook menus and shopping lists. Okay, again, no silver bullet here, Joanna, but a couple things that I have used in the past that may be helpful to you and some of the things I've already shared will be helpful to you, too. The first thing I would say is I would talk to it and I would explain who you are, what you're doing, the challenge that you have, and ask it how it can be helpful. That's the first thing I would do. And you're going to be surprised at the amount of things that comes back. Tell me more is the three words you want to use. So dig into that stuff, right? You're going to get into recipes, you're going to get into scheduling. When you get into recipes, it's going to want to know, what do your kids eat? What do they like? Do you have your regular meals? You know, do you have a cadence of certain things that your kids like? Shopping lists and whatnot? If you can come up with meals, then ChatGPT is very good at creating a shopping list for the meals that you're creating. In fact, if you had three different meals, there might be shared ingredients you can use. Maybe this is the first exercise that you do with Joanna is just say, these are what my kids like for food. Right. Give me some other options. Because if they're like my kids. Spencer has the smallest palate of all my kids. He eats either Mac and cheese, plain pasta, steak, or chicken fingers. That's about the extent of his diet. And I would love to extend that. Right. And I haven't done this exercise either. Your question has my head kind of going. Maybe I'm saying, hey, here's a situation. My son is 14. These are the four things he lives off. What are some things that I could get him to try that would be in the same genre? Right. So that you can start diversifying a little bit. So I would do that first is I would tell them the situation. Tell ChatGPT the situation, Joanna, just like I did with Jamie, I would say, I want you to understand where I'm at and what I need. What information do you need for me to be successful? Right? And this is who I am, and this is what I do, and this is what I'm challenged with. Okay. So that's the first thing I would get it to interview you. And then let's dig into the food and dig into the recipes and dig into shopping list. I think you're going to be really surprised if you use ChatGPT as the interview to you what it can pull from you and what can actually what it can analyze. Okay. Scheduling. I haven't found a way yet outside of coding and getting into, you know, using other software. And connecting to ChatGPT to have it understand or create scheduling, that kind of thing. But this is what I have done. We have, I use Apple calendar and I have three calendars. I have my work one, I have my own personal one and then I have a family one. Okay, so the work one, because I have a, when somebody wants to set a meeting with me, I send them a find a time and day calendar, you know, option that they can look at my planning calendar and set up a call. And so I use my work calendar for that, to block out time that's available and not available. And then personal is just little things that I'm going to do that aren't necessarily work related and I don't need anyone else to see. And it doesn't really belong on the family calendar. And then the family calendar is shared amongst a few of us and these are concerts and trips and you know, so and so needs to be at work. And we have basketball practice and track practice and track meets and all that kind of stuff. Okay. And so what I do every Sunday is I take a picture, I can see all of those calendars at once. They're color coded on my screen. So I take a picture or a screenshot, let's say, of the week that is ahead and I feed it to ChatGPT as part of my weekly review. So I have taught it to be an accountability partner for me, to be one that can help me achieve goals and stay organized. Just like Joanna, what you asked me, right? That's what you're looking to do. And so it knows some of the things that I'm challenged with, it knows some of the project goals I have, it knows some of the things that need help following up on. It knows what I want to do, long term goals, short term goals, that kind of thing. But then it also looks at the calendar and it connects that screenshot I'm talking about and it says it looks like you have a meeting on Thursday with Bill. Right. You've mentioned that you've been wanting to do XYZ with Bill. Is that project moving forward, do you need help preparing for that meeting, all that kind of thing. Right. So I think where I'd end with you, Joanna, is spend some time sharing with ChatGPT what it is you're challenged with, what you'd like to do again, what successes have them. Learn a little about your situation. And then with the calendar thing, you know, if you want to create an accountability partner, you can use the calendar, the screenshot of the calendar to kind of look ahead so it can help you best plan. Right. And hopefully that's helpful. I know that it's been extremely helpful for me when I use it. And I do have weeks where I. And I'm like, oh, yeah, I set all that up and I didn't use it at all. And then I wonder why, maybe I'm a little rushed and a little hurried and not as organized and all that stuff. You know, we go through those ebbs and flows. But Joanna, I think, I think you'll find some value in just having conversation with it and going through some of these exercises that I mentioned, both with you and others. Okay, so there you go. There's some questions that have come in. Good stuff. And there's, I mean, I love hearing from you guys. As I've mentioned before, if you have a question, first of all, I would say use your own curiosity. So if you have the question, shoot it to ChatGPT. If you want to shoot it to me as well, I'm happy to take a look at it. I'd happy to, to see if I can be helpful. But ChatGPT loves to play teacher. It just does. Just like my daughters did growing up. It loves to play teacher. So it loves to do its best work to feed back into ChatGPT. Okay. And then don't be afraid to ask a question. Don't be afraid to be a little vulnerable and give us some information. And if it's not giving you what you want, don't be afraid to say, that's not what I want. Can you help me get better? Okay, so chatgpt experiment.com Like I said, there's some, some training, there's some articles there, there's some resources for you. You'll be able to see workshops. Had. Had some great workshops, by the way. Had four or five this week. Got to meet some folks. Appreciate the conversations I've had both domestically and overseas. Right. Had a conversation with a husband and wife in the UK that was awesome. Really cool to see. How are you using ChatGPT, the questions that you have? And I love the light bulb moments. There's, there's always a light bulb moment or two where something breaks, you know, the fog lifts and, and that's, that's really, really cool because I know that once they get off the training with me, they're going to be able to use that nugget for other things. So that's really, really cool. So, hey, thanks for listening ChatGPT experiment.com if you have any questions, you can reach me through there. And as always, until we talk again, your curiosity is the most important element and the most important answer to most of the questions that you are going to have here. Okay? So until we talk again, be good. Okay? Talk soon.
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