How I Used ChatGPT as a Thought Partner

Last week I took several courses on Generative AI right here from the Linkedin Learning library. One, in particular, How to Research and Write using Generative AI, was probably the most profound so far as the instructor took such care to point out the need for human driven thinking and creating which I appreciated as a former educator.

From my conversations with educators in the last week, the greatest fear about AI seems to be that students will begin to turn in 100% generated content and let’s be honest, many will. However, I do think that as these tools continue to grow and spread, it is even more important to provide guidance on ethical use and more in depth understanding through concrete examples of what collaborating with AI can potentially be.?

When I initially planned this newsletter, I had this grand idea to share writing centered on teacher training and AI. Equipped with the knowledge from the course mentioned above as well as another course on Prompt Engineering, I went to ChatGPT and drafted my first real prompt.?

The Prompt

This prompt was meant to limit the AI's scope of information to pull from by not only providing background but also a few lines of thought meant to drive this session's conversation. I wanted it to somewhat think like I would, although that in and of itself was just wishful thinking.

Narrowing the Focus

What this exchange provided me was a starting point for my own thinking which drove the next round of questions. On any given day prior to this, I would have stared at a blank screen for hours or in all honesty, walked away and waited for an idea to just pop in my head which is how my writing generally occurred prior to this tool.

Continuing to Narrow the Focus

These were the guiding questions that chatGPT provided. I narrowed further and provided more background as the output was a bit too robotic in thought than I wanted to go. Again, this is about getting to the core of your own creativity with the AI doing the lifting as a thought partner.

Re-Generating Yet Again...But More Focused

This is where it gets fun because eventually, you just talk to the AI as if it's a person sitting right beside you. To be clear, I know it is not but the gist of our conversation at this point has been a back and forth of dialogue with me mostly disagreeing with its output and asking for narrowed thought or clarification. Again, had this been the before times, I would have never had this level of thinking on my own in the time that it took me to get to this point.

The Moment of Frustration and Clarity

At this point, the exchange almost felt like a lost cause in that the ideas were clearly not where I wanted to go and that moment of frustration is normal I think. This is the point where I merged thoughts that I wanted to keep with my own brain dump of thinking.

The Moment of Truth

This moment was the moment where I sat back in my chair not only in awe but with a great deal of relief. I finally had what I felt was a brilliant starting point of writing driven by my own thinking with the support of AI. What I asked next actually scared me because I didn't want it to write. That's a hard deal breaker for me. I only wanted it to go more in depth in outline and questioning. I got lucky because this could have gone the wrong way and fast!

Finally, the most important part of this exchange...

At the end of our session, I asked ChatGPT to summarize how we worked together and in the end, this exchange felt much more important than the entire stream of thinking of our initial session. What I hope that you take away from this is how Generative AI can be a great partner for creativity but more than anything that no matter what we do and how we do it, we need to keep the humanity at the forefront.

In case you missed it, Linkedin is offering a suite of FREE Generative AI courses through the month of June. Definitely check them out!