May 11, 2023
I know you’ve seen the recent flurry of activity and news surrounding large language models and generative AI. Big technological advances in AI capabilities have thrust our world into critical conversations about what the future of our society looks like. We’re at such an important precipice that just this month, technology leaders have publicly called for a pause on current research to allow more time for adequate safeguards. Amid these big questions, everyone is eager to understand how to use new tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT to make their day-to-day work less burdensome and/or their businesses more efficient.
We love working with clients to develop comprehensive strategies for the future of their businesses in the age of AI, but we also recognize that it’s easy for individuals to feel behind the curve about ChatGPT and its capabilities as new features and APIs are surfacing seemingly by the hour.
Here, we’ll talk about some intro-level examples about how we use ChatGPT at Render. We encourage you to spend some time using this tool and finding your own unique applications as well. To be clear, these examples, even collectively, do not represent a comprehensive AI strategy, but they’ll be useful if you’re still unsure what all the hubbub is about. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll talk about ways we’ve used ChatGPT-3 specifically, since it’s currently being offered for free by its creators at OpenAI. If you haven’t used ChatGPT before, you can create a free account here. One more note: before you get started, be sure to check your organization’s policies and procedures regarding AI tools, and when in doubt, don’t share confidential data or information with ChatGPT.
Here are some use cases to get started:
Copywriting
Definitely its most obvious use case, ChatGPT is pretty good (but not great) at writing. We’ve used ChatGPT to create marketing emails, webpage copy, keynote speaker short biographies, and more. I didn’t use ChatGPT to write this post on principle, but I could have! We’ve had success using prompts for generating copy that follow this format:
Please write a [FORMAT–this could be an email, blog post, paragraph, etc.] that [PURPOSE–describes our product] in a [STYLE–light-hearted, friendly style]?
And even better, you can ask ChatGPT to modify its own output. You can ask it to re-write its output after the prompt above, for example, and make it slightly humorous, or cut it down to under 200 words. We won’t spend too much time here because there are excellent in-depth resources elsewhere, and our favorite guides will walk you through how to enlist ChatGPT to write the best prompt for itself.
Tip: Because of the way ChatGPT currently works, it will sometimes create data points/facts that are not true. It’s best to check unfamiliar stats/statements for accuracy, and remember–you can always ask ChatGPT to provide sources and citations for the information it presents.
Idea Generation
ChatGPT can be an excellent brainstorming partner. We’ve asked it to generate potential titles for webinars, topics for blogs, taglines for brands, and more. ChatGPT is non-judgmental and endlessly willing to try again after making the adjustments that you specify. Try this: after ChatGPT generates a list of ideas for, say, catchy blog titles, ask the tool to ask you some questions that might improve the results.
Formatting
OK, not very glamorous, but it’s a not-immediately-obvious use of ChatGPT. Say you need to take a list and do something to each element in the list. For a simple example, you might have a list of street addresses, and you want to append “Louisville, KY” to each of those addresses. Sure, you can do it by hand if it’s just a handful of items in the list, or if the list is more substantial, you could paste it into a spreadsheet and google the formula that will do it for you. ChatGPT is a handy way to do this quickly–just paste your list in the chat prompt and tell ChatGPT what to do. This is especially helpful if the task is more complex. Recently, someone emailed me a list of about 25 LinkedIn profile URLs as an invite list for an event. I asked ChatGPT to pull out the first and last names of the people from those profiles–something that would have probably taken me about 30 minutes–and it was done instantaneously.
Synthesizing Information
We recently hosted a group of service providers dedicated to improving the lives of those experiencing homelessness for an ideation session at Render’s offices. We had over 20 participants, and each participant jotted down several ideas over the course of the day, generating dozens of great ideas we wanted to be sure to document. Rather than sifting through these individually to sort into broad topic areas, we asked ChatGPT to do it for us–you can see the results here, neatly organized for ease of consumption.
ChatGPT is also good at synthesizing technical information–simply paste the text into the chat prompt and ask ChatGPT for a number of bullet points to summarize.
How do you use ChatGPT in your work? How are you integrating new tools into your business strategies?
If you’d like to hear more details about how we use ChatGPT at Render and how you might get started, schedule your 30-minute session one-on-one with an expert from our team.
