What is ChatGPT & 10 Creative Ways To Use It in 2024
Being among the top AI chatbots out there, ChatGPT proves to be an invaluable resource capable of assisting you in a wide range of tasks, whether it's crafting captivating video scripts or designing visually appealing websites. Its rapid generation of unique content makes it a remarkable tool for producing outstanding work, regardless of your expertise level. In this article, we'll delve into ten innovative ways to leverage its capabilities, discuss some of its constraints, and offer tips on maximizing its potential. Let's get started.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is an advanced conversational software powered by three sophisticated models known as generative pre-trained transformers (GPT). These models are trained on extensive text data sourced from a variety of platforms, including books, social media, websites, and Reddit discussions. Through this training, the models acquire a deep understanding of language rules and usage patterns, enabling them to generate text and code based on user input.
It's worth noting that the 3.5 version of ChatGPT is trained on data up to 2021. However, users can access information beyond that date by upgrading to the 4.0 version through a paid plan. Despite being a series of language models, ChatGPT employs a unique approach to generate output. Instead of working with individual letters, it uses tokens and word fragments to form complete words. For instance, while "dog" is represented as a single token, "alligator" is composed of two tokens: "all" and "igator".
When generating output, ChatGPT considers various factors, including the likelihood of words appearing together and the temperature setting. The temperature setting plays a crucial role in determining the creativity and diversity of the generated output.
The temperature setting in ChatGPT influences the randomness and coherence of the generated output. A lower temperature, like 0.2, results in more focused and predictable responses, while a higher temperature, such as 1.0, yields more diverse and creative outputs, exploring a wider range of possibilities. By default, ChatGPT's temperature setting hovers around 0.7, striking a balance between coherence and creativity in the generated responses.
Now that you have a grasp of how ChatGPT operates, let's delve into its capabilities and limitations.
Understanding the Capabilities of ChatGPT
Since its inception in 2022, ChatGPT has emerged as one of the most widely embraced AI chatbots. Its rapid adoption is evident from the staggering statistic of over 100 million sign-ups within the initial two months alone. As AI advancements continue to progress at an unprecedented pace, discerning the boundaries of ChatGPT's capabilities can pose a challenge.
Benefits of ChatGPT
ChatGPT stands out as an incredibly versatile tool, offering a myriad of possibilities for various tasks. Whether you're conducting research, summarizing content, translating text, grading assessments, or simply engaging in conversation, ChatGPT proves to be a valuable asset. Despite its remarkable capabilities, it's important to acknowledge that AI technology is still in its nascent stages, and there may be occasional challenges along the way.
Critics raise concerns about the rapid pace of technological advancement, warning of potential job displacement. Nevertheless, the integration of AI into our daily lives appears inevitable. Embracing this technology and learning to utilize it ethically can significantly enhance productivity and efficiency. However, it's prudent to remain mindful of potential drawbacks associated with the use of ChatGPT and AI in general.
What Are the Limitations of ChatGPT?
It's crucial to approach the information provided by ChatGPT with caution due to its tendency to offer inaccurate data. Always verify the facts independently to ensure accuracy. Another limitation is its inability to access real-time internet data, relying solely on information available up to 2021. Consequently, it cannot provide the latest news or insights into current technologies, potentially posing challenges.
Moreover, ChatGPT lacks the capability to generate images or videos, necessitating the use of alternative AI tools like art generators or video creators for such tasks. Fortunately, there are numerous other resources available to fulfill these needs.
Additionally, the responses generated by ChatGPT may not always exhibit a human-like quality, requiring extensive fine-tuning to achieve the desired output. However, this serves as a reminder that blindly accepting its output verbatim is ethically questionable. Ultimately, ChatGPT is designed to assist rather than replace human involvement in tasks.
How to Generate Prompts with ChatGPT
To excel with ChatGPT or similar AI Chatbots, mastering the art of crafting effective prompts is paramount—a skill more intricate than it may initially appear. Given the occasional inaccuracies in AI model outputs, initiating with a well-crafted, descriptive prompt is crucial. This aspect is deemed so significant in the evolving AI landscape that new roles, such as prompt engineers, are emerging to tackle it. If you're considering exploring AI-driven opportunities, your journey begins with crafting the right prompt.
Here's a concise guide outlining practical strategies for generating prompts:
Engage in conversational dialogue: ChatGPT operates on conversational AI principles, so aim to interact with it as if you were having a face-to-face conversation. When formulating prompts, include casual details, be descriptive, and articulate your needs clearly, delving into even the minutest specifics.
Offer contextual information: Provide explanatory context alongside your prompts. Rather than issuing commands like "Create a headline about WordPress," furnish background information such as, "I aim to introduce newcomers to WordPress, emphasizing its user-friendly nature. Can you generate potential headlines that would pique readers' interest in learning about WordPress?"
By adopting these strategies, you can optimize your interactions with AI chatbots and enhance the quality of responses received.
Have ChatGPT assume an identity:
Another tip is to have the AI embody the person or company you’re inquiring about. For example, let’s say you want to write a review about Divi. Rather than saying tell me why Divi is a great theme, say something like from the point of view of its CEO, describe why Divi may be the best choice for WordPress users.
Those are just a few specific examples of ways to enhance AI’s output, but there are additional tips to consider:
- Re-ask the question until you get the answer you desire
- Make changes to your prompts to alter the output
- Specify the length of the answer you’re looking for
- Ask it to cite sources
Regardless of the type of answer, using a well-constructed prompt when using ChatGPT will give you better results than a standard prompt devoid of context, descriptors, or clarification.
10 Creative Ways to Use ChatGPT
There exists an extensive array of tasks that ChatGPT can assist you with, extending to creative endeavors. Whether you're a seasoned creative professional or just venturing into design, writing, or web development, integrating ChatGPT—or another proficient AI chatbot—into your workflow can significantly streamline your processes. Let's delve into ten effective strategies to enhance your creativity and optimize time management across your projects.
1. Blog Topics and Keyword Research
Sometimes adding a new blog post to your website can be challenging. If you need a little help with keyword research and creating effective headlines for your posts, ChatGPT is a great tool to use. Using a good prompt, ChatGPT can generate keyword ideas based on the subject of your choice.
After picking a topic, you can ask ChatGPT to generate some related headlines. As an example, it gave us a list of 15 topics related to WordPress. After choosing WordPress Design Trends, it gave us ten pretty engaging titles that we can use.
Next, we prompted ChatGPT to provide an outline based on responsive design in WordPress. It ironed out a list of main points to craft our outline. While we had to make adjustments here and there, it provided a great start to draft our post.
2. Assist in Generating Copy for a Website
Using ChatGPT as a guide, you can generate copy for your posts, blurbs, FAQs, and more. However, as previously mentioned, you should never use AI to write your entire post. Using it to generate ideas is OK, but you should rewrite any generated copy in your voice. Aside from the ethical implications (a huge part), Google doesn’t care for AI-generated content, which could hurt your ranking in search engines. It’s always best to have it guide you, inspire you, and discover facts that you might not know. That said, be sure to fact-check everything it gives you, as it can generate false information.
Better yet, rather than having it generate copy for you, it’s best to refine copy that you have written yourself.
3. Proofreading and Editing
When writing new content, especially as a beginner, it can be too easy to be wordy, misspell words, or omit a point that may be relevant. Thankfully, ChatGPT is the perfect tool to help revise, condense, or make your original content flow better. After writing a few paragraphs for your posts or other web content, input it into ChatGPT and prompt it to improve your content. One tip to follow is telling it to keep the original tone of voice. This lets the tool know that you intend to control what is written yet improve it based on the parameters you provide.
As an example, we took the paragraph we’ve written above and asked it to make it more concise while keeping the original writing tone. Because ChatGPT is a conversational tool, it will try to utilize earlier prompts in the thread for relevancy. Based on this process, you can use ChatGPT to trim excess fluff, spot misspellings, make things more concise, or provide ideas on making your copy more relevant.
4. Creating WordPress Plugins
Another great way to use ChatGPT is to create plugins that you can use on your WordPress website. For the plugin to be functional and avoid further prompts, you must be more creative with your initial prompt.
For instance, we provided this information:
Create a WordPress plugin called “Dee Maintenance” that does the below actions once activated.
- After a user logs in, redirect them to the home page after logging in.
- If a user lands on the site but is logged out, show them a maintenance mode message that says this website is under maintenance. Give us a little time as we’re making things look awesome for you.
- Style the maintenance message with a grey background with a 5px border radius.
- Give the text a font size of 2em and make it red.
It provided a functional PHP file and told us how to implement it on our website. While you could use ChatGPT to code complex plugins, it can also be essential in creating plugins like these to help you keep your website bloat down.
5. Writing and Debugging Code
If you’re a web developer, chances are you’ve encountered errors with your website’s code or discovered console errors on your website. Thanks to ChatGPT, you can get the assistance you need with a well-crafted prompt. For example, we asked ChatGPT to identify a common console error to get help understanding the problem and how to fix it. It successfully identified the problem and provided us with the steps to correct it.
So, what happens if you have a more complex problem to solve? No worries because ChatGPT can assist with that too. In addition to debugging code issues, it will also write code for you. It understands various programming languages such as CSS, HTML, Javascript, PHP, etc.
If you’re a beginner, ChatGPT is an excellent tool for explaining what a code’s function is. For example, we grabbed a script from a Divi website and asked it to explain it. It described the code’s purpose with detailed information to make it easier to understand (as if we were a beginner). As a result, ChatGPT turned into an instructor, making it an excellent tool for people wanting to learn more about coding.
6. Generate Video Scripts
If you want to create promotional videos for marketing campaigns, ChatGPT is a great asset. Generating video scripts is the same process as blog posts but with a few differences. Of course, you’ll need to start with a keyword or title, then provide as many details as possible to get the best results. Anyone who creates videos can tell you the process can sometimes take hours or even days to develop a script. ChatGPT can do it in minutes. You can even use detailed prompts for effects and transitions that you can copy and paste into a good AI video generator to enhance it.
It can even be used to create YouTube videos, TikTok videos, and much more. For instance, we asked it to make a 30-second clip about five unknown dog facts. It generated a full script with ideas on which assets to use—pretty amazing stuff.
7. Generate Surveys and Quizzes
Quizzes and surveys are great tools for gaining valuable insights from your customers. Marketers can take these answers and use them to develop good marketing strategies. They are short, simple, and engaging, making good conversation pieces for users to share on social media. ChatGPT excels at this, so making them is a lot easier. You can create topics, titles, descriptions, and, yes, questions to include in your surveys and quizzes in a few short minutes.
For example, we asked ChatGPT to create a survey for an online jewelry store with lagging sales. We entered a concise prompt and got some pretty good questions about their shopping experience. You can take what ChatGPT gives you to gain other ideas for questions or reformat them to meet the needs of your specific business.
If you’re a WordPress user, you can use a good quiz plugin or survey plugin to add a quiz to your site quickly. That said, the possibilities are endless. You can ask ChatGPT to create HTML to incorporate your quiz into a static website, prompt it to make a text-to-image description to use with an AI art generator, and more.
8. Market Research
When conducting market research with ChatGPT, being specific is the best way to start. Tell it about the product or service you’d like insight on, provide specific demographics to look at, and even ask it to embody your target audience.
For instance, we asked ChatGPT to help identify people in Birmingham, Alabama, that would likely be interested in purchasing web design services. With a well-crafted prompt, it provided us with the age groups, income and education levels, and the specific locations of that area that would be our best demographic to target. While this is a basic example, it gives you a good concept of what ChatGPT can do.
Additionally, you can prompt ChatGPT to give a perspective or speak as a particular entity. It will help if you continue feeding it after the initial prompt to ensure you get the best results. Finally, as we’ve stated many times in our article, please don’t take what it says as absolute. Following up with your research is essential to ensure you have the correct facts.
9. Write Product Descriptions
If you have an ecommerce website, one of the most tedious tasks is writing good product descriptions. This is especially true if you have hundreds of products to create. Thankfully, ChatGPT and other AI writing software can help with that. As with any other task you ask of ChatGPT, you get what you give. So, to get the best results, be descriptive yet precise in telling it what you want.
We asked it to create a product description for an insulated 20-ounce cup we want to sell. After the initial prompt, it spits out five paragraphs, which is too much for a product description. So, in a follow-up prompt, we instructed it to provide two concise yet easy-to-read sections that make our product sound fun.
10. Generating AI Art
Our final creative way of using ChatGPT combines it with other AI programs to create beautiful artwork. Since ChatGPT is a language model, it can’t currently create images for you. However, there is a plethora of AI software that can help. When you are ready to create your art, you can combine it with a program such as MidJourney to design webpages, image assets, and so much more.
Alternatively, you can use ChatGPT to generate prompts for AI image generators. However, this method requires quite a bit of tweaking to get things like you want them, and most text-to-image AI software can do that for you.
Final Thoughts on Using ChatGPT
ChatGPT is a powerful tool with many practical uses, from blog topics and proofreading to coding websites and WordPress plugins. While it does have some mighty AI chops under the hood, it’s important to remember that it does have some limitations. We highly suggest you use it as a guide rather than having it do all of your work for you. After all, it’s meant to be an assistive tool, not a job replacement.
With its innovative technology, ChatGPT has the potential to revolutionize how we approach content creation, marketing, and technology. The sky’s the limit with AI, and it is exciting to see what kind of advancements it will bring.