A New AI Toy: ChatGPT

Several years ago I worked on a chat engine and learned a lot in the process. At the time we had a long way to go to create a program that did a great job mimicking human conversation. OpenAI is a company that released ChatGPT in November of last year and it does a pretty good job of realizing that goal. Today I decided to sit down and play with it for a bit and see how good it is.

One of my colleagues played with it as well and fed it a multiplication problem with 2 4-digit numbers. It came close to providing the right answer but a calculator revealed it didn't get the problem correct. Unless you pulled out a calculator though, you wouldn't know because it stated the answer with such certainty.

Armed with the information that it was good at answering questions but it wasn't that great at Math, I asked a different kind of question. I thought back to my college English courses and asked why experts consider "Moby Dick" to be such an example of classic American literature. I suffered through the book in college and hated it. Then I decided to pick it up after learning to sail in the hopes of understanding it better. While I understood the vocabulary, I actually prefer Herman Melville's "Typee" over "Moby Dick." I think Mr. Melville did as well.

ChatGPT came back with an amazing answer that would have greatly improved my grade in College. The answer had 5 parts discussing the detail the author included in the story indicating that Herman Melville actually spent time on a whaling ship. It talked about the struggle between good and evil as well as the futility of seeking revenge. Having read the book twice and really understood it once, I had to agree with the answer.

I don't think ChatGPT is going to take over the world. It would need to have a better understanding of mathematics and engineering to do that. It will give college professors something to worry about though. If I was back at the University, I would immediately use ChatGPT to help me start any papers I need to write. So is that plagiarism? Probably but if done correctly, it would be impossible for anyone to tell. I'm glad I am not a professor. About they only thing they can do is move from written papers and exams to oral ones.

Software Product Features

Earlier this week I attended 2 different seminars on how to get the most out of the software products I use daily in my job. I will confess that I didn't learn a lot but I discovered several new features that I didn't know about. It got me thinking about how to figure out what features are available in the many different software products we all use.

The first method of discovering new product features is when we do something new. This week I put together a Google Doc's document and needed one section to have 2 columns while the rest of the document just needed that standard single column. In Microsoft Word and other word processing software, there is a "Columns" icon. All you need to do is select the text you want to put into multiple columns, click the columns button, and select how many columns you want. In an effort to reduce screen clutter, Google decided it didn't need a column icon. Instead I just needed to select the text, click on the "Format" menu, and a drop-down menu showed a number of additional options, including columns. I correctly assumed the feature existed but didn't know how to use it until I had a document that required it.

The second method of discovering new product features is attending seminars outlining product features. This is what I did this week at work. We spend a lot of money with certain companies and they always want to make sure we are happy with our purchases and that generally includes taking advantage of all features. Unfortunately not everyone spends large amounts of money on software and don't have access to these seminars.

The third method of discovering new product features is through Internet searches and product videos. Perhaps you are trying to calculate something in a spreadsheet and the video you are watching shows you how to do the calculation but also shows some new features that you didn't know about. I find that very helpful.

Finally, there is the method of watching somebody doing something new that you have not seen before. Perhaps you are watching them edit a document and with a few keystrokes something amazing happens. Don't be afraid to ask them what they did. Then be sure to immediately give it a shot the next time you are working on a document. The best way to learn something new is to practice and so immediately trying something you have recently seen will reinforce the knowledge.

We all use quite a few different software products whether it is on our computers or on our phones. My personal estimate is that we really only use about a third of what the software can do. While we may not need all of those features on a daily basis, there are many more things we can do if we only know certain features exist.