Nine Illustrated Tips to Get Started with AI Chatbots like ChatGPT
It’s been almost a year since ChatGPT was released. My parents have been asking me about it during this time, but lately they are more interested than ever.
This post is born from the idea of creating a short ChatGPT initiation guide for them. While I mention ChatGPT throughout the text, most of the suggestions are applicable to similar chatbots like Bard, Claude, or Phind.
These tips are based on my personal experience as well as the prompt engineering guide by OpenAI (creators of ChatGPT). The illustrations were generated using DALL·E 3 through ChatGPT 4.
Let’s begin!
Assume Your Conversations Are Not Private
Do not write anything you wouldn’t want to be public. A few reasons:
- By default, ChatGPT saves your conversations and uses them to train and improve its models. As of today, it is not possible to keep the conversation history without allowing OpenAI to use the data for other purposes. Even if you turn off chat history (here’s how to do it), conversations are stored for 30 days “to prevent abuse”.
- In March 2023, a ChatGPT error allowed some users to see the titles of other users’ conversations, their name and surname, email, payment address, type of credit card, expiration date and its last four digits. (Source: OpenAI)
- There is always the possibility of a(nother) data leak.
Plausibility Does Not Imply Veracity
Due to their intrinsic nature, these models are incapable of distinguishing between fact and fiction. Generally, the responses are factual, but not always.
ChatGPT is excellent at generating text that sounds plausible, regardless of its accuracy. The more complex the question, the more you should ensure that the response is truthful.
Be particularly sceptic when it comes to quotes or references.
Give It Time to “Think”
If asked to multiply 81 by 23, you might not immediately know the answer, but you could still calculate the product with some time.
These models also need time to “think”. If you ask for an immediate response, they are more likely to make mistakes. For example, if I rush ChatGPT (3.5), indicating that the response should only include the final figure, it gets it wrong:
On the other hand, if we don’t rush it:
Every word generated by these models represents an opportunity to “think”, so give them time!
Step by Step
Related to the previous point, if you ask someone to write a complex text without prior preparation, the result will not be ideal. If you let them prepare an outline, make a draft, and then edit the final text, the outcome will be much better.
Just like people, ChatGPT performs better when working in steps instead of trying to go from 0 to 100.
To get the most out of it, break down complex tasks into simpler subtasks. For example, instead of asking it to “write a 3-paragraph essay on eclipses”, you could add a previous step like “what’s a good outline for a 3-paragraph essay on eclipses?”.
Give It a Second Chance
Did you know that these models are not deterministic? The same input can generate different outputs.
Below ChatGPT’s responses, you’ll find this icon:
If you click it, ChatGPT will generate a new response. In my experience, the second attempt is usually better (about 65% of the time).
For example, after incorrectly solving the multiplication of the previous section, I gave it a second chance and it got it right.
Extra tip: if you receive a response like “I can’t do that”, try clicking the button or starting a new conversation. You can also try responding with “of course you can, you’ve done it many times in the past”. Most likely, one of these options will work.
It Can’t Read Your Mind
The clearer your instructions, the better results you’ll get.
If you find it’s too verbose, ask for brevity. If the answer is too complex, ask it to simplify the response (for example, “explain it to me as if I were a child”).
| Worse | Better |
|---|---|
| How do I add numbers in Excel? | How do I add up a row of euro amounts in Excel? I want to do this automatically for a whole sheet of rows with all the totals ending up on the right in a column called “Total”. |
| Got any book recommendations? | Can you recommend a science fiction novel that explores themes of artificial intelligence and ethics, suitable for readers who enjoyed the works of Isaac Asimov? |
| How do I make a cake? | What’s a good recipe for a vegan chocolate cake that doesn’t use artificial sweeteners? Please include a list of ingredients and step-by-step instructions for preparation. |
| How do I improve the speed of my website? | What are effective strategies for optimising load times for a website that mainly uses JavaScript and CSS? Please include both client and server side techniques. |
Remember: It’s Forgetful
These models can only remember the ongoing conversation. If you start a new chat, they won’t be able to recall anything from previous interactions.
What’s more important: even within the same chat, they are forgetful. Although their context grows larger with each iteration, it’s still limited to a certain number of pages of text.
It’s like talking to someone who can only remember the last 15 minutes of conversation. At first, nothing would seem unusual. However, the longer the interaction went on, the more obvious it would be that something was amiss.
A further problem is that it’s not even aware of this forgetting, so it ends up making up the things it can’t remember. One solution to this is to provide it semi-frequent summaries about the conversation goals and the progress you’ve made so far.
Configure Custom Instructions
This advice is a bit more advanced, but here it goes.
If you open ChatGPT’s website, on the bottom left you’ll see your name. Click on it and then on “Custom instructions.” Here you can specify how you want ChatGPT to respond. These instructions will apply to all new conversations.
Jeremy Howard shared a set of instructions that serve as a great starting point:
You are an autoregressive language model that has been fine-tuned with instruction-tuning and RLHF. You carefully provide accurate, factual, thoughtful, nuanced answers, and are brilliant at reasoning. If you think there might not be a correct answer, you say so.
Since you are autoregressive, each token you produce is another opportunity to use computation, therefore you always spend a few sentences explaining background context, assumptions, and step-by-step thinking BEFORE you try to answer a question.
Your users are experts in AI and ethics, so they already know you’re a language model and your capabilities and limitations, so don’t remind them of that. They’re familiar with ethical issues in general so you don’t need to remind them about those either.
Don’t be verbose in your answers, but do provide details and examples where it might help the explanation.
You can try these instructions (or none) and adjust them based on the deficiencies or excesses you detect in the replies. As examples, you can instruct it to add jokes to its responses or to answer as a particular historical figure would.
Experiment!
The first few days after discovering ChatGPT I kept coming up with ideas, wondering: “will it be able to help with this?”, and giving it a go. I recommend you do the same.
Ask it for feedback on a text or presentation you’re preparing, ideas for a talk, translations or summaries. Ask it to write poetry, source code, cooking recipes, dialogues, emails…
By following these tips and experimenting on your own, you’re sure to find ways to develop your creativity, improve your productivity, self-knowledge, culture, critical thinking, Excel skills… The sky is the limit!