ChatGPT has been in the tech news for about two months, and you’ve likely heard about it. I have had mixed feelings about it, because I know that it can be both an incredible tool for productivity and a way to escape doing valuable work. One of the concerns I have is that it could be used to avoid doing the real writing that is required in college. There’s a lot of value in doing that kind of writing, and most of it is the critical thinking that we have to do in order to write like that. ChatGPT can do the writing, but it can’t do the deep thinking that we need to be able to do to solve our own problems.
I still wanted to see what it could do, but I really didn’t know how to begin exploring it until I picked up an eBook and its companion audiobook written by someone who had done a seriously deep dive into it. Once I understood how it could be used, I started playing around with it. I was having trouble synthesizing some notes I had taken into coherent thoughts so I could write an article about a topic. I took the notes in their raw form, and into the ChatGPT page, I typed:
“As an expert, organize these notes into coherent text:”, and then I held the shift key and hit Enter. That kept me in the input box instead of completing the request. At the next line, I pasted in the text I copied from my notes, held shift and hit Enter again, and repeated the process until I had all the notes copied in, then I hit Enter.
ChatGPT spit out a couple of paragraphs of remarkably coherent text, as I had asked. I did have to change a few things in order to make sure it was saying exactly what I wanted it to say, but it worked well for this purpose.
I had an idea a long time ago to write a philosophical blog post after I saw a car lying upside down in the median of the interstate. Unfortunately, the only thing I recorded was “Blog post: the upside down car,” and this was more than four years ago. I cannot remember what had gone through my mind that I wanted to write. I asked ChatGPT to outline a five-paragraph humorous essay with the title “The Upside Down Car.” ChatGPT obliged. I then instructed ChatGPT to write a five-page essay titled The Upside Down Car from the above outline. Again, ChatGPT obliged. Here are the first two paragraphs:
“Have you ever seen a car driving on the road with its roof on the ground and wheels pointing up? Well, that’s what happened to me when I got into a little accident the other day. It was quite a sight, and I’m here to tell you all about it.
“First of all, let me give you a little background on how I ended up in this situation. I was driving down the highway, singing along to my favorite tunes, when suddenly a truck cut me off. I swerved to avoid a collision, but my car spun out of control and flipped over onto its roof.”
I had ChatGPT regenerate the response, and these two paragraphs started that effort:
“Have you ever had a day where everything seems to be going wrong? Well, let me tell you about the day I had. It all started with my car, which ended up upside down. Yes, you read that right. Here’s how it happened.
Firstly, I need to confess that I’m not the best driver in the world. Okay, I’m probably one of the worst. But I never thought I’d be so bad that my car would flip over. It all happened when I was driving down a steep hill, and my brakes failed. In a panic, I tried to turn the wheel, but I overcorrected and ended up flipping the car upside down. I remember thinking to myself, “Well, this isn’t ideal.” “
I had it regenerate again, and got this:
“Have you ever seen a car upside down? It’s a sight to behold, and I know this from personal experience. I was once driving to work when it happened to me. Here’s the story:
Paragraph 1: Introduction Driving down the road, everything was going fine. The radio was playing my favorite song, and the sun was shining. Suddenly, I hit a pothole, and the next thing I knew, my car was upside down. I was hanging from my seatbelt like a bat, and I was scared out of my mind.”
I got ChatGPT to help me create a lesson plan for a group of teenagers using a particular item for an object lesson. I’ll have to make a couple of tweaks to make it work with a much smaller group, but overall, I’m excited at the many ways I can find to use it. I want to encourage you to play around with it. By the way, ChatGPT didn’t write this. I did.