#BR17: Using ChatGPT to get better at using ChatGPT

It’s the 17th edition of Breaktime Reflections and for this week’s issue, I spent a few more hours experimenting with ChatGPT (GPT4) and DALL-E, and thought I’d share some learnings:

1. How can you use LLM chatbots (ChatGPT/ Gemini/ Copilot) for business?

Here’s an example question that can give you ideas of what you can actually do with ChatGPT or other LLM chatbots:

What are some key use cases of Gen AI for businesses? (you can replace “business” with a more specific industry that you may be curious about)

This query gave me 12 relevant business use cases along with a short description of how the bot can help.

If you’re already using AI for work, you probably don’t need the inspiration. But this prompt can be great for people in the company who haven’t tried it yet because they don’t know what they could use it for. Its capabilities can serve businesses in quite a number of interesting ways.

P.S. if you’re concerned about data security and privacy, Microsoft Copilot is a great alternative to ChatGPT because it provides paying customers options for additional data protections and security.

2. How to get better at writing prompts for image generation:

You can ask ChatGPT to describe an uploaded image in order to learn more about how it sees information in images and use similar descriptive styles when asking it to generate new images from text.

Let me elaborate. Let’s say you want to use ChatGPT (actually DALL-E in this case) to create images, but you’re not sure how to effectively describe what you want it to create. Something that I’ve done a few times is to attach an image that I like and ask ChatGPT to describe it using a prompt like this:

Describe the image attached. Be brief and specific and focus especially on [x]

[X] is the thing that is most important to me in the image - i.e. landscape descriptions, style descriptions, character traits etc

You can use the resulting description to guide you on how to write more detailed prompts that will lead to better overall results.

3. It’s good at teaching you best practices related to achieving a specific result

Case in point: I was wondering if and how I could use AI to create consistent-looking characters/items/ scenes using GenAI tools such as DALL-E 3 (which is part of ChatGPT with a paid subscription).

The first thing that I did was to look that up on Google and Skillshare (skillshare because I already have a subscription). And I indeed figured out how and to what extent that can be done. But then I wondered if ChatGPT could’ve taught me the same best practices directly. So I tried it out with this question:

What are some best practices I can apply to get consistent characters using DALL-E?

I received just about the same information that I had already learned. There’s only one good tip I got from my Google searches that I didn’t learn from ChatGPT. So you can learn a lot about how to make the most of its capabilities without having to do any external research, just by asking the chatbot to help you along.

—

Hope you find those tips useful! Starting next week, I’m beginning a new phase of this newsletter where I will ask other experts to share their own thoughts and insights on the usual newsletter topics: productivity, creativity, and mindset.

If there’s anyone you’d like to recommend as a contributor, let me know!