What is ChatGPT?

You’ve likely heard a lot about it. It’s great. It’s terrible. Maybe your teachers have banned it. Maybe your friends won’t stop talking about it. It’s everywhere. But can it be useful to you?

It absolutely can. But, as with any search tool, it’s good to get the lay of the land so it can help you as much as possible with few to no problems along the way.

Can ChatGPT do this “hallucination” thing?

Yes it can. It’s not guaranteed to give you exactly the right answer to every question you ask it. It can make up answers (called “hallucinating”). It can also just give you one-sided information, incomplete information, etc. Just like any other search engine…

Advice on how to use it

Get ChatGPT to Role Play

My first recommendation is to treat ChatGPT like a person (and not just because of the incoming robot apocalypse =)

But not just any person. I want you to help ChatGPT get into character for every question that you ask it. If you want help meal planning, get ChatGPT to role play as a private chef or a dietician. If you need to know some cool facts about potatoes, have ChatGPT role play as a teacher trying to engage bored students or as a fun uncle trying to get his niece to take an interest in his field of expertise. If you want a detailed study plan for your upcoming AP exams, you could have ChatGPT role play as a teacher, curriculum designer, or even a productivity influencer.

Here’s a quick video describing all that a bit more.

Get ChatGPT to do Your Planning and Grunt Work

And then, I have another video that I think contains useful ChatGPT advice. It’s centered around people looking to advance their career, but you could ask very similar questions about College Strategy while in high school, or about various opportunities while in college. Here’s the video.

You can have ChatGPT create a personalized roadmap for anything, giving you very specific details, certifications, and other advice. You can have it create schedules for you, and you can ask for time-limited activities. You can have it actually create study tools for you based on any material. You can also have it help you write letters and emails, and even get help with networking. One of the biggest things to really learn here is how to phrase questions in order to get the best results out of ChatGPT. So, play around with phrasing, ask the same question on different days (or in incognito mode), and otherwise generally treat this as a big experiment. This experimentalism is actually the way I treat all search engines, but I think ChatGPT leans into it even more.