It's hard to believe it's already been 1 year since ChatGPT took over the world,
and I'm going to take you through the best use cases I found for ChatGPT,
what I don't recommend using it for, and then ultimately if I think it's worth the hype. Let's
actually talk about that last part first. Overall, I think ChatGPT has actually lived up to its hype,
and that's because I think for a lot of people, myself included, ChatGPT not
only demonstrated for the first time what AI technology can do in a very practical sense,
but it provided people with a new tool that turned out to be incredibly useful for so many different
scenarios. From writing macros to speed up part of your job, to editing cover letters,
writing code, generating resumes from a few bullet points, giving advice, drafting blog posts,
and yes, even doing homework assignments, ChatGPT could do a lot when it launched.
Now, my immediate use for it was a little bit more silly. I found out you could use it to write
fictional dialogue from a TV show or between two people from the real world. It's especially good
when you use a modifier like in the style of "Rick and Morty" dialogue. For example,
recently I had this thought of what it would be like if Rick stumbled into a Tesla
meeting on the Cybertruck, which seems like a thing that, in my head, should just exist,
and ChatGPT did not disappoint. It even had a few pretty good Cybertruck burns, like,
"I know who he is, Morty. What I don't know is why he's turning A into a rejected math problem."
Now, the more practical thing I started using ChatGPT for was for closed captions for my
YouTube videos. YouTube will automatically generate closed captions for every video,
but I was having to go in and manually edit them. With ChatGPT, I found that it could
just take the alright transcript that I got from YouTube and edit it into great closed captions
with correct punctuation and keeping all of the words I said, while not trying to rewrite the
captions. These more practical applications are where ChatGPT's real staying power is.
But what about all this data you're giving ChatGPT? What exactly is OpenAI,
the maker of ChatGPT and one of the dramas of the century, doing with it? By default, your
chats are used to train OpenAI's models. However, in April 2023, OpenAI rolled out the ability for
you to disable chat history in ChatGPT, and when you do this, the data you give ChatGPT
will not be used to train its models, and your chat will not be saved in the sidebar. However,
keep in mind that the conversations will still be retained for 30 days to monitor for abuse
before being deleted permanently. You can also use the export option within ChatGPT
to see and understand all of the data that ChatGPT is actually storing from your chats.
And if you're worried about giving OpenAI sensitive business data,
the company now has a subscription service called ChatGPT Enterprise,
which comes with enterprise-grade security and privacy for your company's data. Next,
let's talk about the new capabilities OpenAI gave ChatGPT during the past year. One of the biggest
changes they made was an integration with Bing, which allows ChatGPT to be able to search the
web when you ask it a question. And this isn't just used to answer simple queries, but it can
actually do some pretty complex searches. For example, over the holidays, I saw a trash can
from Simplehuman that I've had my eye on for a while now, but it was out of stock. I tried doing
a Google search to find retailers that might have it in stock, without a ton of success, actually,
and the experience overall was just kind of taxing. I then had the thought like, "Hey, maybe
ChatGPT could actually do all of this searching for me." So, I gave it a link to the item that
was out of stock and asked it to provide me other retailers that may have it, and then I specified
what the model was that I was looking for. And while not all of the links it gave me were the
exact model I was looking for, the experience was faster and much more simple than scouring
Google's blue links. It felt like I was handing my issue off to somebody else to solve for me.
That was one of the most surprising parts of this entire experience. It really shows how much better
search could be and how mentally tasking searching Google sometimes is. ChatGPT, at least today,
has no ads and no sponsored blue links. So that's search, but what else can ChatGPT do now? Well,
it turns out, a lot more. You can generate images with it now using OpenAI's DALL-E model. You can
use your voice to converse with ChatGPT. Can you generate a futuristic image of a city with trains,
trams, and other rail transit, and no cars? Here's the image of a futuristic city with
advanced public transit like trains and trams, and no cars. Uh, let me know what you think.
Do you know why the US is so reliant on cars and has limited train transit compared to other
countries? The reliance of the US on cars and its limited train transit compared to other countries
is due to several historical and cultural factors. One, car culture and suburbanization:
after World War II, there was a significant shift towards suburban living in the US. This suburban
expansion, combined with the American love for cars, led to car-centric urban planning.
ChatGPT can also now analyze a photo. So, for example, I can give it the YouTube thumbnail I
created for this video, along with the video's title, and have it analyze it. The last big
feature OpenAI rolled out for ChatGPT happened during OpenAI's Dev Day, where they announced
GPTs. GPTs are tailored versions of ChatGPT for a specific purpose. They're OpenAI's first small
step towards a future where you have different AI agents for different tasks. And while you yourself
can make one without learning how to code, the real power with these is actually for developers,
who can give them access to APIs and specific data, like the Zapier one demoed during the
keynote, which integrated with Slack and could send Slack messages on a user's behalf.
I played around with creating one based on myself and my YouTube videos, but I had way more fun,
honestly, creating a Sad Elon bot that insults you for not being an engineer, tells you all sorts
of weird dad jokes, and constantly insists that Teslas in an underground tunnel is more cool and
efficient than just putting in a subway. What do you think the city of the future should look like?
Here's the city of the future as I envision it, dominated by high-rise buildings with a cyberpunk
flair. It's a world where Tesla reigns supreme, and archaic trains are nowhere to be seen.
So far, OpenAI has designed other GPTs like a negotiation one, one for analyzing data and
visualizing it, one for turning your ideas into coloring book sheets, one for laundry,
math homework, and one that explains Gen Z memes, which is very good. So those are a
lot of the updates that ChatGPT received during the past year, but what are some specific things
that I've used it for? Well, one thing that I've used it for is having it take a look at
my writing and giving me suggestions on how I can improve it. It's especially useful for
when you're writing something outside of the norm, like a resignation letter or condolence message,
where you want to make sure the tone of what you're writing does what you want it to.
I've also used ChatGPT a lot for emails and social media posts. For emails, I'll feed in
the email that I received and then tell it how I want it to respond, with a few bullet points.
For social media posts, I'll typically create the first draft, but then ask ChatGPT to analyze it
and how it could be improved. Overall, though, I think what it comes up with is often a bit
too fake-feeling for social media posts, so I'll still usually have to adjust it a bit.
Now, you may be wondering, did I try to use ChatGPT to write my scripts here for my YouTube
videos? And the answer to that is, well, no, I didn't use it to write a script completely
from scratch. I did, however, try to have it take an outline that I had already written and create
a finalized script from that, but it just doesn't do a good job splitting out the parts that should
be B-roll from the parts where it makes sense for me to be on camera. But I do use ChatGPT to look
over my script outlines. For example, I've had it look over a comparison video script outline,
and it pointed out to me like, "Hey, you forgot to talk about the battery life when
you're comparing these two phones." Like, it's actually pretty useful for that type of scenario.
Now, another thing that I've used ChatGPT for is contracts. Now, not writing contracts,
I still pay a lawyer to do that, but when I get a contract from a client,
I'll use ChatGPT to analyze it and look for specific keywords like indemnification,
exclusivity, usage rights, etc. It'll alert me when it finds that language in the contract,
which then I'll go and read over the entire thing in full. Another thing I use ChatGPT for
a lot is general readability, grammar, punctuation, and spelling corrections.
The last thing I've used it for is generating bits of HTML for my new website, which I launched six
months later. I wanted it to generate code for a sticky menu, and it did exactly what I wanted it
to do. Plus, it gave me extra tips on other ways I could accomplish building one with a WordPress
site. Next, let's talk about the downsides of using ChatGPT. By far, the biggest one is that the
information you get from ChatGPT is not always correct. This is a problem with all of these large
language learning models, otherwise known as LLMs, like ChatGPT and Google's BERT. They will just
confidently lie to you. To be fair, ChatGPT does warn you about this at the bottom of its site.
Unfortunately, because of this, it lessens how much you can really rely on ChatGPT for serious
tasks. Even for less serious tasks, like helping you improve your grammar or readability of text,
ChatGPT will often tell you why it made a change, but that explanation could even be wrong. So,
I find myself often double-checking it to make sure I'm not learning an incorrect grammar rule.
Now, how wrong is ChatGPT generally? In my experience, it really depends on what you're
asking for. For example, when analyzing a contract, sometimes it'll incorrectly make
up a clause that doesn't actually exist in the contract. Or when doing a product search, it'll
often link to an incorrect product or site. But for other things, it's been surprisingly accurate,
like for recipe generation. For example, I've asked it for several ice cream recipe ideas now,
and as someone who makes ice cream pretty regularly, I've been really impressed with what
it gives me. The ratios have always looked right, and a lot of the answers to my random questions,
like the answer previously to why the U.S. is so car-dependent, were actually accurate. But even
with access to search data, ChatGPT can still give you information that looks correct but is
not. Because of that, I can't recommend using it for serious searches. Another downside with
ChatGPT is speed and reliability. Depending on what you ask it, especially for things
like web searches, it can take a while to generate a response. And on rare occasions,
it'll just absolutely fail, and you'll need to regenerate the response. I notice
this a lot when you're having to edit large amounts of text, like closed captions. Also,
because of ChatGPT's popularity, performance issues have dogged the service since its
launch. The service can sometimes go down, and you'll often see a message like this,
which I took the week I filmed this video when ChatGPT went down for a bit.
The last downside of ChatGPT is actually just getting started. ChatGPT can do so much that
it's hard to know all of the things it can actually do when you first open it. And it
can also sometimes be hard to prompt it to get exactly what you're looking for.
OpenAI has tried to remedy this somewhat by giving it popular examples of what you
can ask it for above the prompt box, as well as a section on OpenAI's website.
Next, let's talk about ChatGPT Plus, which is ChatGPT's paid subscription plan. You've
already heard me talk about many of its features, but now let's go through exactly what you get and
if I think it's worth paying for. ChatGPT Plus is a $20 USD a month subscription that gets you
access to all of ChatGPT's capabilities, including access to GPT-4, though it has a 40-message per
hour limit at the time of recording. ChatGPT Plus also gets you access to ChatGPT's capabilities of
analyzing images, creating images. You also get priority access to ChatGPT during high demand,
faster responses, and new features like the GPTs and also ChatGPT 4's knowledge has been upgraded
to April 2023. Though do note, as I'm recording this, OpenAI has actually paused signups for
ChatGPT Plus due to overwhelming demand. The free version of ChatGPT gets you ChatGPT 3.5,
which is the regular model whose knowledge goes up until September 2021.
So, should you be using ChatGPT? Yes, as long as you understand its limitations. I highly recommend
trying it out. I think anyone can find at least one use case for ChatGPT, and that right there
is the core reason why it has lived up to the hype so far. Now, should you pay to use ChatGPT
Plus? That's a bit tougher. You can get a lot out of using just the regular ChatGPT version
in combination with other free chatbots like Google's BERT, which overall, in my experience,
hasn't been as consistently good as ChatGPT, but it does have more up-to-date information
and it can now integrate with other services like YouTube, Google Maps, Google Flights, hotels,
and more, all for free. But if you want access to the most powerful model from OpenAI available
to consumers, plus access to all of their new features like GPTs, DALL·E's image generator,
and more, I don't necessarily think $20 a month is unreasonable, especially when you consider that
they're throwing in the image generator. I was previously paying $10 a month to use MidJourney,
but I find OpenAI's implementation of DALL·E to be more conversational and frankly easier to use.
So, those are my thoughts on using ChatGPT one year later. Let me know if you think I
got it right or if you think I got something wrong down in the comments below. And let me
know what you use ChatGPT for as well. If you like this video, hit that thumbs-up button and
consider subscribing to the channel for more, like our upcoming comparison video between
BERT and ChatGPT. If you'd like to see more of our content on AI and smart products, you can
do that by clicking on the videos above. For Six Months Later, I'm Josh Teder. Thanks for watching.