Top Five Ways ChatGPT Can Improve Your Daily Tasks (and Five Things ChatGPT Doesn't Do)

Over the past few weeks there have been a LOT of articles on Open AI's ChatGPT with many noting that Google search is dead (which I debunk further down in this article). ChatGPT is all the rage in a new way of querying and getting answers to questions. There's been a lot of concern that this Artificial Intelligence stuff can replace us, rendering us useless.

ChatGPT technology https://chat.openai.com/chat takes human input (ie: a question), that then combines information it has in its database to provide a response.?Unlike Google that “simply” provides you a bunch of links to sites that requires YOU to go read and figure out the answer, ChatGPT actually provides you a structured response.

Concerns of ChatGPT in Acadmics

There has been a lot of chatter how students can use ChatGPT to complete homework assignments when a question like “write a 1000-word essay comparing and contrasting {insert any topical question you want}” results within seconds a fully structured response, or at least close enough without all the time and effort to actually do research and write the response themselves.

Leveraging ChatGPT is like Working on a Group Project

I’ve been fiddling with ChatGPT for a few months now, typing in one-off questions that I get asked and compare its answer to things that I had already responded to.

As much as I could use ChatGPT to just DO my job and answer questions I get (if I were super lazy and don't really care about the quality of answer I shoot out), I've found several ways to leverage the technology to IMPROVE my job (not just DO my job). My focus has been to not have ChatGPT replace me (equals 1), or some combination of ChatGPT plus me (still equaling 1), but I'm taking ChatGPT and putting it to use so that it is me plus ChatGPT to potentially even equal 2 (or more)!

It's like doing a group project. If 1 person could do the whole project, it'll be WAY more efficient to just have that 1 person start and finish the project than have a whole group of people working together with all the time/overhead of integrating as a Team if the end result could be done in a fraction of the time by 1 person.

The reason we work as a Team for a project is because we are (presumably) bringing multiple people (potentially multiple experts) to the table, dividing and conquering tasks by having several individuals take on slices of a project, then combine the super qualified work effort of each individual into a better end result!

Five Ways ChatGPT is Improving My Daily Tasks (My +1 Assistant)

Here are the top 5 ways I've leveraged ChatGPT to be +1 for me, effectively turning out better results than in a world before the technology existed:

1. Confirming Assumptions - Many times in a day I get asked a question or come up with an idea that I want to bounce by someone to get input. Might be to confirm my assumptions, might be to determine if there's been academic research already on a topic. A quick query to ChatGPT is a bit of a sounding board that quickly validates for me "ah, there has been research on that already..." or "wow, I've been wrong on that whole idea my entire life..." (Example query to ChatGPT: Is there a correlation between the cloud seeding being done in the Middle East and the intensified hurricanes in the Americas?)
2. Shortening Research Time / Adding Visual Context - Another way I've leveraged ChatGPT is to have it shorten my research time (from hours to minutes) that I can then utilize the time I've saved to create visual content in my deliverables. Where a "picture paints a thousand words," ChatGPT can efficiently write 1000-words in seconds, that I would still review and validate its response is what I'd write and stand behind, but then I can then spend the rest of my time creating a chart, graphic, visual of the results transforming an email reply or boring text presentation into one that has visual body to the context. (ChatGPT can write-it, I can SHOW it!)
3. Adding in Experiences to a Response - The response any expert will share with you is there is a big difference between being "book smart" versus having real world experience. I've been able to leverage ChatGPT to derive the "background information" on some topic quickly and succinctly, which I then add on "lessons learned," "how I (or my company) has done whatever in the past," "best practices we utilize," etc. The expert in the room is the person with credentials, has real world know-how, and can tell you the quirks, undocumented issues, and steer you in the right direction. The expert can focus their time on sharing firsthand knowledge and experiences expanding beyond the AI derived quick background info.
4. Suggesting an Answer to a Question I have No Clue About - There are times when a tough question is asked, and there are crickets of no responses. I've jumped into ChatGPT, gotten some answer back, and replied to the person with "I just put that question into ChatGPT, and this is what it came back with..." A couple times I've gotten the "yeah, ChatGPT is wrong!" but several times what I relayed as ChatGPT's answer WAS the solution! ChatGPT might replace a frequent under my breath "does he really not know how Google works..." to maybe my new silent comment "does he not know about ChatGPT?" :-) But I always reference "this is what ChatGPT said..." as the thing is frequently wrong or not something I particularly want to stake my reputation as having conjured up the answer provided.
5. Summarizing Content from Multiple Resources - I've written and blogged a lot of content over the years, and my frustration with Google is I have to go read all my stuff it finds to zero in on what I was looking for. ChatGPT will summarize my content, and with a question like "What are Rand Morimoto's latest opinions on..." gives me the most current responses. For now, this is helpful for content ChatGPT has ingested off public sites, but as we turn ChatGPT internally in private secured AI language model systems to our corporate environments, we will be able to expand our use to query emails, documents, and other internal business resources to come up with a response.

ChatGPT for Internal / Corporate Content Queries

As I alluded to in my fifth bullet point above, a local instance of ChatGPT can be turned inward to our corporate environments to ingest information and provide AI driven responses. Just like a couple decades ago when we went out and bought SharePoint, Google, or Altavista appliances to crawl our internal Exchange email servers and file servers, you could setup all of the infrastructure needed to crawl your corporate environment and have a local instance of ChatGPT.

However, give it a few months, those using Microsoft Office 365 will likely start seeing ChatGPT technology embedded in the Microsoft cloud so that you can do an AI query of your O365 emails, OneDrive files, SharePoint and Teams folders, etc.

We've thought nothing of it over the past few years since we migrated our emails to Office 365, and started to put our files in Teams, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive that we do a search and it finds our stuff. That's all just a cloud-version of the old SharePoint Search and Index server from years ago. There's no wonder why Microsoft has been in the news lately with their billion $ investments into this ChatGPT technology.

Five Things ChatGPT Doesn't Do

To cut through the hype and getting down to some real answers here, these are the top five things I'll note that ChatGPT doesn't do:

1. ChatGPT's Dataset Does Not Crawl the Internet in Realtime - If you ask ChatGPT if it is on the Internet, it'll tell you it is NOT and you'd think it's a typo. However ChatGPT's dataset is data that was imported and processed several months ago and is a static set of information. I've asked ChatGPT questions about content I've posted on recently, and it doesn't find anything I've publicly published in a while.
2. ChatGPT Does Not Provide You Source Information - This is the biggest problem with ChatGPT, while it'll give you an answer, it won't tell you where it found the answer. So as much as it might be good to write a short high school essay, in any real academic work where you need to provide citations, ChatGPT doesn't provide you ANY insight where or how it derived its response.
3. ChatGPT Only Knows the Data in its Database - As referenced before, ChatGPT is not live on the Internet, and not actively crawling sites. Much of ChatCPT's base "knowledge" seems to come from an import of content from Wikipedia as you can pretty much go back to Wikipedia and find the basic answers there. If ChatGPT isn't regularly updated and new research data, scientific reports, literary content is released but not updated into the databases that ChatGPT's uses, then the responses get dated over time.
4. ChatGPT's Responses Become Predictable - Being that ChatGPT is a static dataset and AI algorithms tend to reply with a similar response to the same question, over time you find ChatGPT provides the exact same response to the same question. And when it includes some quirky inaccurate point, it repeats that point in future queries as well. After a few months of using ChatGPT, I can pretty much pick out ChatGPT answers to certain questions when I see things (like "What's the benefit of the Microsoft Azure cloud" or blah blah blah "Rand Morimoto"), ChatGPT plays back the same information even if you rephrase the question in a slightly different manner. The answers aren't necessarily wrong, but they do become very predictable.
5. ChatGPT Does Not Learn Better Answers to Questions - The way ChatGPT works today, it solely provides an AI generated response from the data it has ingested in its systems. While the term Artificial Intelligence is commonly thrown out when referencing ChatGPT, the system does not have a learning mechanism to fix and improve its responses. There's no fact checking process, there's no way to "fix" incorrect data that it knows of to make answers better. Which is why it's important not to rely on ChatGPT for a completely accurate answer, just consider ChatGPT's answer as a "potential" answer to your question (for now).

Being More Valuable than Artificial Intelligence

So I still need Google. With the bullets above, there's no way I can just have ChatGPT as my search tool. I still use Google just as much as before, to provide me links to potential source documents, content I can cite, validation that what I'm reading is from a reputable source versus being crawled from a dataset full of unverified data sources. Google's not quite dead yet, but ChatGPT definitely adds a piece to our day-to-day information access.

And as for whether ChatGPT's AI can replace us, ah, not quite yet. As much as Artificial Intelligence can rattle off info, until it actually hands-on DOES the work, SEEN problems come up, EXPERIENCED issues, DERIVED solutions, IMPLEMENTED fixes, and SOLVED problems from real world experience itself, there's still a place for a knowledgeable person.

Wrap-up

So ChatGPT is helpful if you are looking for a quick formatted answer on something, and just as I've effectively leveraged it in my day to day to help me EXPAND what I do, there's still a lot of things that this new technology cannot do.

History has shown that machines, automation, and technological advances do create innovative revolutions, and we do have to continue to find a niche that keeps us one or two steps ahead of complete obsolescence, but for now we still have time to be relevant. But this ChatGPT, AI-based technology is definitely taking a strong position in the future of information search and access!