ChatGPT has exploded in popularity, and people are using it to write articles and essays, generate marketing copy and computer code, or simply as a learning or research tool. However, most people don’t understand how it works or what it can do, so they are either not happy with its results or not using it in a way that can draw out its best capabilities.
I’m a human factors engineer. A core principle in my field is never blame the user. Unfortunately, the ChatGPT search-box interface elicits the wrong mental model and leads users to believe that entering a simple question should lead to a comprehensive result, but that’s not how ChatGPT works.
Unlike a search engine, with static and stored results, ChatGPT never copies, retrieves or looks up information from anywhere. Rather, it generates every word anew. You send it a prompt, and based on its machine-learning training on massive amounts of text, it creates an original answer.
Most importantly, each chat retains context during a conversation, meaning that questions asked and answers provided earlier in the conversation will inform responses it generates later. The answers, therefore, are malleable, and the user needs to participate in an iterative process to shape them into something useful.
Your mental model of a machine – how you conceive of it – is important for using it effectively. To understand how to shape a productive session with ChatGPT, think of it as a glider that takes you on journeys through knowledge and possibilities.
Dimensions of knowledge
You can begin by thinking of a specific dimension or space in a topic that intrigues you. If the topic were chocolate, for example, you might ask it to write a tragic love story about Hershey’s Kisses. The glider has been trained on essentially everything ever written about Kisses, and similarly it “knows” how to glide through all kinds of story spaces – so it will confidently take you on a flight through Hershey’s Kisses space to produce the desired story.
You might instead ask it to explain five ways in which chocolate is healthy and give the response in the style of Dr. Seuss. Your requests will launch the glider through different knowledge spaces – chocolate and health – toward a different destination – a story in a specific style.
Your explorations with ChatGPT can span multiple areas of knowledge – for example, crossing chocolate with climate change, cuisine, health, international trade or romance fiction.
AP Photo/Hermann J. Knippertz
To unlock ChatGPT’s full potential, you can learn to fly the glider through “transversal” spaces – areas that cross multiple domains of knowledge. By guiding it through these domains, ChatGPT will learn both the scope and angle of your interest and will begin to adjust its response to provide better answers.
For example, consider this prompt: “Can you give me advice on getting healthy.” In that query, ChatGPT…