I expect many people watching this have already used generative AI.
The problem is the way a lot of people are introduced
to this is using trivial examples, like create a bedtime story,
write a poem, plan a fishing trip.
And when you begin that way,
it can often be tough to make the leap into actually being productive,
being useful with this.
So even if you have used generative AI already,
for a moment, let's pretend you hadn't and just kind of begin again.
What should your first 5 minutes with this have looked like?
Now I could demonstrate generative AI using many different tools. We are
going to begin with ChatGPT because it's the most popular,
most well known of the generative AI chatbots.
ChatGPT is at the website chat.openai.com.
You'll need to create an account if you haven't already.
But let's just jump right in and start with a prompt.
Write a one‑paragraph email to my boss asking for Friday off,
and here's what ChatGPT comes back with.
‑I hope this message finds you well,
am writing to formally request time off this coming Friday.
‑But watch what happens when I ask it to rewrite it to be less formal.
‑Hope you're doing great.
I wanted to ask if it's okay for me to take this Friday off.
‑When you use a chatbot, it keeps track of context,
meaning the history of chat, the relevant details that were mentioned earlier.
So here, I just said rewrite it to be less formal.
The AI knows that it means the email to the boss I just asked you to write.
Now this is very different from say using a search engine where
every interaction you have just begins again.
Now I could keep this chat, this conversation going,
but I'll start a new one for a different kind of question.
Let's say I just got a message asking me to fill in for someone on a
technical interview that's going to begin in 5 minutes.
I need some prep.
So, write some interview questions for an entry‑level web developer.
Now an important point.
If you're following along using ChatGPT or any other AI chatbot
and you typed in exactly the same prompt I did,
you should expect the results to be similar but different.
If I entered the exact same prompt again and again and again,
I would expect a different result every time.
Generative AI does not produce identical responses.
There's a level of randomness and unpredictability.
Just as if you'd asked 10 people to do this,
you would expect 10 slightly different results,
it's the same here.
But let's switch gears to another example.
Let's say a colleague just sent me a link to a research paper.
At the time, I'm recording this late 2023,
if I just have a basic ChatGPT account, I can't upload a PDF.
But if I have a basic account at Anthropic Claude, I can.
So let's switch over to a different chatbot.
It's a PDF, but I know this is publicly available on
the web so I don't mind uploading it.
And I tell Claude to summarize the main points in this research paper.
And this is one of the things generative AI is great at, the
idea of summarizing longer amounts of content.
But let's say I looked at that summary and I saw there's
something I'd like to know more about.
So I'll refine it. Expand on what the paper says about .2.
It can be a great productivity tool right from the start to digest
long documents or long emails into concise insights.
And here's the thing.
Your prompts don't have to be perfect.
Most AI chatbots are pretty forgiving about punctuation and grammar.
This is not like programming languages where you have to write
statements within an exact perfect syntax.
I could have written these requests in many different ways.
However, a little later,
we're going to talk about the different kinds of things you'd say in
your prompts to help guide the AI to better results.
But when you're starting out with generative AI, do not get hung
up on crafting the perfect prompt right away.
There's a lot of people out there that tell you they have the
perfect prompt for some business situation.
They're usually trying to sell you something.
The key is to have this attitude of continuous experimentation and
revision. Treat the initial prompt as a starting point.
Ask the AI to build on those ideas and rewrite its responses.
Try different prompts from different angles.
Tweak the prompts that don't work well, and
sometimes just give up and start again.
There is an art to prompting, and it develops
through actively engaging with this.
So rather than expect instant perfection,
just embrace this exploration idea. See what works,
see what doesn't, and improve along the way.
So, we've covered helping write emails and then rephrasing those emails,
creating interview questions and then refining those questions,
asking for summaries,
then expanding on those, and we're just starting to scratch the surface.