OpenAI research labs recently released ChatGPT to the public. You may have seen people talking about it online, which is why you’ve ended up on this page.
If you’re not already set up to use ChatGPT (and the OpenAI Playground), you can click the following link to go to the OpenAI Playground and register an account. I used my Google account, which took less than 10 seconds.
Initially, you are given $18 worth of credit to use for free. You may be surprised at just how long this takes to use up, so don’t feel like you need to hold back on using this powerful tool. I’ve spent hours using it and have only just crossed the $5 mark.
I personally prefer using the Playground instead of the ChatGPT feature as it offers a lot more variety of what you can do with it. Both use the latest GPT-3, but you can choose which one you use in the Playground.
Here are ten creative ways to use OpenAI’s new tool.
- For writers – writing and assisting with writing stories & novels
- For songwriters – writing and assisting with writing songs & music
- For bloggers – writing blog posts & generating SEO-friendly titles
- For businesses – generating ideas & writing business plans
- For jobseekers – creating a CV and cover letter
- For webmasters – create websites easily in HTML & CSS
- For programmers – generate & debug code in any language
- For language learners – learn phrases & more in another language
- For problem solvers – find solutions without search engine fluff
- For social seekers – have conversations with anybody
1. Writing/Finishing Stories & Generating Story Ideas
You can either write a complete story, rewrite an existing one, or ask the AI to finish your sentence or chapter. There is so much flexibility that the saying ‘The world is your oyster’ really does apply here.
Here’s an example of asking it to finish the paragraph I drafted:
As you can see, the highlighted green text is what the AI generated. If you’re not entirely happy with that, you can click the ‘Re-generate’ button to re-do the content that it came up with. For example:
But let’s say you have an idea for a story in mind, but don’t quite know where to start with it. You can feed it ideas and you may be surprised by just how effective it is:
Pretty good, right? This is just the tip of the iceberg. For example, here’s the same prompt, but where I have asked it to make the writing style witty and humorous:
You get the point. From here, you can write even just the start of a sentence and it will continue generating the story, using the previously-generated text to aid what comes next.
I’ll throw one more in here relating to writing stories and then move on. It can be a fantastic tool for generating story ideas, for example:
2. Writing/Finishing Songs & Generating Song Ideas
Similar to the idea above, you can use it in the same way to generate songs:
I won’t show the rest of the song as you get the point. Here’s an example of asking it to finish I song I started to draft:
You can of course specify whatever you want, such as asking it to make every sentence rhyme, or to write it in a similar style to your desired artist.
Like with generating story ideas, here’s how you can also use it to come up with ideas for songs:
3. Generate Full Blog Posts & Titles
This is an interesting one because the end result is extremely convincing. From my testing, I have found that it is virtually impossible to discern a real post from the generated one. They also have not been picked up on plagiarism checkers, showing that the content is original. What this means for the future of internet content is a story for another time.
Here’s some examples:
Now here’s the same prompt, but this time I specify the desired writing style:
Pretty good, right? To show that this isn’t just a one-off occurrence, I’ll use the ‘Re-generate’ button:
You get the point. Here’s an example of using the tool to generate some blog title ideas:
4. Generate Business Ideas
This is pretty cool and can be taken further by asking it to write a business plan, if you like. I’ll keep this short and simple and just show you some images of how I use the tool to do this:
What if you want a snappy and creative name for your new business? Well, ChatGPT (OpenAI) has that covered too:
As you can see here, I added this prompt after the previous results, so it was able to use the previous ideas for inspiration.
5. Create a CV (in HTML format)
If you’re looking to create a CV from scratch, or revamp your current one, I’ve discovered that GPT3 is pretty good at that too. You can ask it to generate this as plain text, and it’ll do just that, but I’ve found that it’s even more effective when you ask it to write it using HTML and CSS so that you can save the generated webpage as a PDF, ready to send to potential employers. I’ll let the images do the talking:
This can of course be refined even further. I previously generated an entire CV which included paragraphs of text relating to the roles specified and it was pretty convincing. I wouldn’t recommend that somebody uses this to replace their actual CV, but rather as a supplement or starting point. The fact that you can have it generate this as a webpage, which can then be saved as a PDF, is pretty damn powerful.
6. Create a Website or Web Application
I’ve been playing around with this quite a bit and have been pretty impressed with the result. You can generate anything from basic websites to websites that will generate a Christmas card based on information submitted in the HTML form that it generates.
Here’s the prompt for a basic website:
And here’s the end result:
Pretty impressive! I particularly like how the navigation links have a hover effect that makes it a lighter purple and the text black. You could take it further and specify that the body of the website should have three columns and have an image at the beginning of each column etc. The possibilities are endless with this and you are only limited by your creativity.
7. Generate JavaScript Code for Anything
You can use the tool to generate fully functional JavaScript for anything that you can think of (and that which the language supports). To save bombarding you with images, I’ll just give some examples of what I have used it for: making a webpage snow/rain, making a page flash different colours, randomising the font type across a page, and randomising the size of different elements.
I’m sure you will be able to come up with far more creative (and useful) ideas than me. Chances are, if you can think of it, the AI can make it happen.
Note that this isn’t limited to only JavaScript. You can input your existing code (across any language) and have the AI debug it. You can ask it to make your existing code more efficient. Etcetera, etcetera.
8. Learn Another Language
I was surprised at just how useful I’ve found the OpenAI Playground to be for improving my Spanish. I have found it particularly useful to use the prompt ‘Give me ten advanced phrases in Spanish with their English translation‘ and variations of that to provide me with new phrases to learn. Here’s an example:
If you’re currently learning a language, you should definitely give this a try. You can even ask it to write the first paragraph of your favourite book in your desired language along with the translation.
9. Find Solutions To Problems
I’ll admit: Google has been failing me in the last few months. I’ve always thought I had a pretty good level of ‘Google Fu’, but I’ve found it increasingly difficult to find what I actually want. So I’ve been using GPT3 to help me find solutions to problems I’ve come across, and the results have been pretty good.
Here’s a generic one I’ve quickly generated for the purposes of this post, but you can of course refine your prompt further to get exactly what you need. You can even ask the AI to elaborate on each point and be concise:
This doesn’t only apply to tech-related problems, of course. Let’s ask the AI why your Venus fly trap is dying and how to keep it alive:
10. Have Conversations
I’d recommend using ChatGPT for this as it uses a simpler interface, but you can use the Playground too. One downside is that at times the ChatGPT will go down due to being at capacity, whereas I haven’t seen any downtime with the playground.
You can have a lot of fun with this, so go ahead and enjoy it. I had an interesting conversation with Boris Johnson, but that’s a story for another day.
Final Thoughts
I think that OpenAI’s GPT3 model has a use for everybody. From aspiring writers to experienced programmers, there seems to be a use case for almost everybody. I have seen multiple people say it’s not perfect, and I know that is not the case, but it is pretty damn good. I think that if you put in the time to tweak and refine your prompts, you can achieve the end result you are looking for in most cases.
I should note that on the right hand side of the Playground page, there are settings you can adjust such as temperature and maximum length. I have not yet experimented with many of these except for the aforementioned. I have found setting temperature to the maximum (1.0) will reduce the genericity of the results, although your mileage may vary. Adjusting the maximum length is particularly useful when generating longer text, such as code or paragraphs for a book.
I will update and refine this post in time and after I have experimented some more, but hopefully these suggestions will offer a good starting point to get those creative juices flowing.
Update 22/12/2022: prompts.chat has a variety of prompts you can copy and use for yourself.
