For those who are not yet using ChatGPT

The dialogue below is based on a real conversation I had with John via SMS, which started with me asking him for support in promoting my course on ChatGPT :

John (a fictitious name given to a colleague working in engineering projects):

- Hi Ivo, how are you? I can help with the promotion, sure. Good luck. My schedule is very tight right now. I've been with XPTO for 2 years, a super large contract, and I'm handling stakeholder management. Big hug.

Me:

- That's great, John. I hope ChatGPT is helping you with your work; the productivity gain is impressive!

John:

- I have to confess it's not. There's no time. Meetings almost all day, and all the time on Teams, which is a fantastic tool if you get to know all the features, not just the chat. And my meetings are with various companies and experts from both sides.

We paused here, and now I'd like to comment: both John and I work all day on projects. I use ChatGPT all the time; it's my digital assistant and greatly enhances my productivity, especially in tasks related to text manipulation, which is the main advantage of generative AI tools. John says he's tight on time, a challenge many of us can relate to, right? He also says "there's no time," meaning he hasn't found time to get familiar with ChatGPT, a tool that has been launched and available for free for almost a year now.

My advice to John, and to anyone reading this message who isn't using ChatGPT yet (which I prefer over 谷歌 's Bard and 微软 's Bing, at least for now): set aside 20 minutes of your time and do the following:

• Create a free account to use ChatGPT by going to the OpenAI ChatGPT link and providing your details.
• Think of a typical use case (UC) for your work, such as sending an email to a supplier.
• In ChatGPT, using your newly created account, open a chat and generate a prompt like this:

PROMPT: I need help with [UC - the use case you chose]. To assist you better, I'll send you some samples of my work related to [UC] to help you get familiar with my style, okay?

• In the same chat, copy and paste samples of your work related to the selected use case. In the free version, you can't send PDFs; that's only available in the Plus version, which has a $20 monthly subscription (which I subscribe to). With each submission, it will likely generate comments on your work.
• Now that you've given him samples of your work, create a prompt like this:

PROMPT: Now that you know my style, create a [UC] for [details about the UC]. [ADDITIONAL CONSIDERATIONS].

The UC can be, for example, [email to supplier X], and the details can be [requesting clarification about a Y-day delay in the delivery of service Z]. Additional considerations can be [Because this supplier has been with our company for many years, and we've been experiencing delays in the last six months, please take this into account when generating the message]. The prompt in this case would look like this:

Create an email to supplier X to request clarification about a Y-day delay in the delivery of service Z. Because this supplier has been with our company for many years, and we've been experiencing delays in the last six months, please take this into account when generating the message. Maintain a polite yet direct and assertive tone.

And then, see what happens! Here's a link to the transcript of my chat with my version of ChatGPT (I used the free option, 3.5) using a "zero-shot prompt" (the one where ChatGPT is asked to generate something without any examples or context to work with):

Example of a chat for the selected use case, "zero-shot prompt" mode

So, how was it?

P.S.: I chose a simple use case to make understanding easier, but of course the script above can be used for various tasks that require text manipulation.