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Writer's pictureSi Taylor

Ways to make AI your friend (without cheating)


Art by Jessica Calaguas
Introduction

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is getting smarter and smarter by the day. ChatGPT is a chatbot that you can ask any question you desire and it will answer to the best of its ability. It’s widely hated by teachers and educators because you can ask it to write your essays for you and even tweak them so there’s no way to tell that it was written by AI. To be completely honest, I think ChatGPT gets a bad rep. Even though it’s mainly used for cheating, it can be used for so much more. If you learn how to use it in the right scenarios, it can make your life significantly easier.


DISCLAIMER:

ChatGPT is not always right. Make sure you double check anything if it tells you something that does not sound like the truth. These are two things it is not good at: 1) Math; if you ask ChatGPT any question that’s harder than 2+2, it will probably lie to you, as it has lied to me when I was asking it about geometry proofs. 2) Advice/therapy; obviously, ChatGPT is not a real person, so it can’t help you with interpersonal communication. It can also give you bad advice, because it scans through the internet and basically steals ideas from different, possibly unreliable, sources and forms a paragraph. If it takes advice from a random article on the internet, it’s probably not the best idea.


The following are all of ChatGPT’s strengths, rather than its limitations and weaknesses.


Cooking/Recipe Help

One way ChatGPT is helpful with cooking is by converting recipes. I had a recipe for a high-protein chicken mac and cheese, but I needed to divide it in half, and everything was measured in grams. Instead of having to use math to convert all of the grams into measurements like tablespoons and teaspoons and also half the recipe, I just copy-pasted it into ChatGPT and it converted the recipe to how I wanted it.


Ideas

Although there are an infinite amount of ideas on the internet, it’s hard to find them by yourself. That’s why ChatGPT can help you come up with a list of whatever you need!

For example: The other day I was ordering something on Amazon, and I needed to spend eight more dollars to qualify my order for free shipping. I couldn’t think of what I could buy, so I asked ChatGPT for a list of 50 things to purchase. Or, here's another example:



Help with a specific homework question

ChatGPT gets a bad name because it’s most known for being used to write essays for you. But, if you use it right, it can help you with your work without doing it for you and cheating. If you have a specific question about a character, book, place, or anything that would be hard to find: Ask ChatGPT. Just beware, if you’re using something you find on ChatGPT as evidence, try to fact-check it, as it can give you misinformation.


Extra Tips

ChatGPT remembers everything you say in the conversation, so you can improve the answers it puts out. For example, you can ask ChatGPT to explain from the perspective of an edgy teen girl, or you can ask it to make the response it just gave you sound fancier, the list goes on. Basically, you can make it write in different styles, have it edit a previous response, change a paragraph that's already written, and literally do anything else you might ask of it.


Funny Messages to friends

ChatGPT is good at writing essays, which is why it’s so hated by schools. But you can also use it to write fancy-sounding messages to your friends. For instance, you could request that it “write a very formal sounding letter to my friend [Name] on why you should loan me five dollars”. What’s great about it is that if you aren’t satisfied with how the letter is produced, you can ask ChatGPT to make it sound fancier, make it longer, or give it extra points to use in an argument.


Conclusion

If you get good at using ChatGPT, it will make your life easier in so many ways. But again, make sure to not overuse it. Your ideas and creativity are always going to be better than an AI, because they’re unique to you. As long as you don’t rely on ChatGPT to do everything for you, it is a helpful tool I think you should consider using.



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Si Taylor
Si Taylor
May 25, 2023


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