what to know
- You can use ChatGPT to write text, lyrics, computer code, and summarize longer texts.
- ChatGPT is not suitable for talking about politics, anything happening recently, or writing long texts.
- Over time, new versions are released. The current version is ChatGPT 4o.
This article explains how to use ChatGPT, its best uses, and where you shouldn't bother using it.
Once you have an account set up on OpenAI, using ChatGPT is actually very simple. To take advantage of AI chat tools, follow these steps:
On the ChatGPT website, click "Sign up" to create an account. If you already have an OpenAI account, select Login .
You can also use ChatGPT on your Android or iOS phone.
After logging in, you will enter the ChatGPT interface. It provides some advice and tips about its limitations, as well as a text box for chatting.
You can have multiple ongoing chats or turn all interactions into one long conversation.
To create a new chat, click + New Chat .
Enter the prompt and press Return / Enter or click the send icon.
There are many reasons to use ChatGPT. You'll be delighted to see how your imagination and creativity challenge this tool. To help you get started, here are some categories you can use ChatGPT in and some suggested tips.
- To summarize the long document : ChatGPT can distill longer pieces into short, easy-to-understand summaries.
- Answer questions : You can use ChatGPT to get answers to fact-based questions (albeit with some limitations and inaccuracies, as described in the next section). Try using prompts like "What was the population of the United States in 1970?"
- Make a Suggestion : ChatGPT can accept prompts such as "Suggest a menu for a fancy dinner party."
- Write text for a specific situation : Need to write a specific type of message or text? ChatGPT can provide a good draft.
- Write text in the style of the author : ChatGPT can imitate well-known authors. Have fun writing almost any type of text you need in the author's style.
- Write a song : While ChatGPT can't generate music, it can write lyrics in serious or silly combinations.
- Write computer code : Programmers are amazed at how effective ChatGPT is at helping them write code in many different programming languages.
You should never pass off the unedited output of ChatGPT as your own work. You should also double-check anything it says because, by their very nature, large language models may not provide completely realistic information.
Simply put, ChatGPT is a very sophisticated matching tool. This means that, while it looks like it's creating something from scratch, it's actually just imitating something in its dataset (which happens to contain billions of examples, making its match very comprehensive). Still, since ChatGPT only matches what it's trained on, it's not good at:
- Date and time : ChatGPT doesn't know what year it is, what day it is, or what time it is. In fact, ChatGPT is unable to provide any information after the release of GPT in 2021. This means that current events or information that occurred/discovered from 2021 will not be discussed.
- Write very long text : Unofficially, the word limit for ChatGPT replies is about 500 words. Or, as the AI itself puts it: “To ensure that my answers are concise and informative, I try to keep my answers between a few sentences and a few paragraphs, depending on the complexity of the question and the amount of information required to be provided. Useful response."
- predict : ChatGPT can only talk about what happened as of 2021 and cannot predict the future. As it told me: "As an AI language model, I do not have the ability to predict future events, such as the winner of the 2024 Super Bowl."
- Talking Politics : ChatGPT aims to remain politically neutral: "I can't make any recommendations about who you should vote for in the U.S. presidential election or any other election. Deciding who to vote for is a personal decision that requires careful consideration of a variety of factors."
- Perform web searches : Although ChatGPT and Google share much of the same data, ChatGPT cannot search the web. It can only search the (very large) database of documents and data it was trained on.
- Create images or videos : ChatGPT is a text-only tool. To create images or videos, try other AI tools such as Dall-E or Stable Diffusion.
The basic version of ChatGPT is free. A premium version called ChatGPT Plus is also available for $20 per month, allowing you to try new features as soon as they become available.
"ChatGPT" is the abbreviation of "Chat Generation Pre-trained Transformer". This is a fancy way of saying that it generates text that is adjusted based on information provided by the programmer.
