What is Chat GPT and what can you do with it?
ChatGPT is a powerful language generation model developed by OpenAI. It is based on the GPT (Generative Pre-training Transformer) architecture and can generate human-like text in a wide range of styles and formats.
One of the key benefits of ChatGPT is its ability to understand context and generate text that is cohesive and coherent. This makes it ideal for a wide range of use cases, including:
1. Writing essays, articles, and cover letters: ChatGPT can assist with writing tasks by generating text based on a specific prompt or topic. This can be especially useful when you're stuck on a specific part of an essay or article and need inspiration to move forward.
2. Generating creative writing: Whether you're a novelist, poet, or screenwriter, ChatGPT can help you generate new ideas, expand upon existing ones, and even write entire scenes or stories.
3. Answering questions and providing information: ChatGPT can be used to answer questions and provide information on a wide range of topics, making it a powerful tool for creating chatbots or virtual assistants.
4. Generating code snippets: ChatGPT can generate code snippets in various programming languages, making it a useful tool for developers and programmers.
5. Translating text: ChatGPT can translate text from one language to another, making it a powerful tool for localization and internationalization.
6. Summarizing long articles or documents: ChatGPT can summarize long articles or documents, making it a useful tool for researchers and students.
7. Creating chatbot or virtual assistant dialogue: ChatGPT can be used to generate responses to customer inquiries in customer service scenarios, or as a component of a chatbot or virtual assistant.
8. Generating product descriptions, headlines or ad copies: ChatGPT can be used to generate descriptions, headlines and ad copies for products, making it a useful tool for e-commerce and digital marketing.
These are just a few examples of what you can do with ChatGPT, but the possibilities are virtually endless. With its ability to understand context and generate human-like text, ChatGPT is a powerful tool that can be used in a wide range of industries and applications.
How can an AI generate creative writing?
Isn’t it supposed to be creative? Doesn’t that come from the human? The answer is it depends. Chat GPT isn’t a replacement for the writer. It’s more like a tool that enhances the writer’s productivity. Much in the same way that the calculator doesn’t replace the human, it just makes them more efficient at solving equations.
I asked Chat GPT to “Describe a grimy apartment with dirty pink carpet and holes in the wall.”
Here’s the output: The apartment is dimly lit and cluttered. The dirty pink carpet is stained and threadbare in some areas. Holes in the walls reveal crumbling plaster and insulation. The air is musty and there is a strong odor of mildew. The kitchen and bathroom are in disrepair, with dirty appliances, peeling linoleum, and mold growing in the grout. The overall impression is one of neglect and poor maintenance.
Not great, but not dumpster garbage either.
Next, I asked it to describe the alleyway next to the apartment.
The output: The alleyway next to the apartment is narrow and cramped. The pavement is cracked and uneven, with weeds growing through the gaps. The walls of the surrounding buildings are blackened with grime and graffiti. There are piles of garbage and discarded items strewn about, and a strong smell of rotting refuse permeates the air. The only light comes from a few flickering streetlamps that cast eerie shadows on the broken pavement. It's a dark and uninviting place, with a feeling of danger and neglect.
I like the flickering streetlamps and piles of garbage. But again, mostly unusable as far as sentences go.
All creative writers enjoy certain aspects of writing more than others. Some love writing dialogue, some creating throwaway characters, and some love spending six paragraphs describing an old farmhouse. But there are some parts of the process that most writers will acknowledge can be tedious. Which is where Chat GPT can be useful.
Let’s say your character encounters a homeless person on the way to work. You don’t want to spend too long on this, but you also want to make it interesting. Let’s see what Chat GPT can come up with.
Prompt: Describe a unique and interesting homeless person sitting outside of a McDonald’s
Output: The homeless person sitting outside of the McDonald's is a middle-aged man with a weathered face and kind eyes. He is wearing a tattered hoodie and torn jeans, but he sits upright with a sense of dignity and pride. His hair is wild and unkempt, but clean, and his beard is neatly trimmed. He has a small cardboard sign in front of him that reads "Anything helps, God bless."
As people pass by him, he greets them with a warm smile and a kind word. He seems to have a positive attitude despite his difficult circumstances. He's engrossed in a book and as people pass by, he looks up and greets them with a friendly smile. It appears that he has found some solace in literature and is using it as a means to escape his current reality. It's a unique aspect that makes him stand out from other homeless people.
Again, not fantastic, but an interesting output nonetheless. If you were writing a story, you could use this as a starting point and edit it into something great. Chat GPT should never be used as the final generator for text. Especially for creative writing. Its writing is boring, bland, and it tends to start a lot of sentences with “the” or “he/she” which gets lame fast.
You can ask it to write in the style of certain authors, but it’s not very good at that yet.
Getting a great output with Chat GPT can often be achieved by giving it an interesting prompt.
Let’s try getting it to describe the apartment again but change the prompt.
Old prompt: describe a grimy apartment with dirty pink carpet and holes in the wall
New prompt: describe a gross two-bedroom apartment, in a grimy and violent part of New York city, in the near future, in a New York city that has been ravaged by a virus, add some very minor cyberpunk elements to the apartment, there should also be a cat with one eye, in the style of Ernest Hemmingway
Output: The two-bedroom apartment is located in a dilapidated building in a grimy, violent part of New York City in the near future. The city has been ravaged by a virus, and the once bustling streets are now abandoned and overgrown. The building is in disrepair, with crumbling concrete walls and broken windows. The elevator is out of order and the stairwell is dark and musty.
Inside the apartment, the walls are stained and peeling, and the floors are covered in grimy linoleum. The furniture is old and worn, and the windows are boarded up. windows are boarded up In one corner of the living room, there is a small, makeshift cyberpunk elements, a makeshift computer set up on a rickety table, wires and circuit boards spilling out from the sides. The screen flickers with static, but it's unclear if it still works.
Sitting in the middle of the room, is a one-eyed cat with a patch over one eye, reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway's cat. The cat looks tired and thin, but it still manages to purr contently as it curls up on a threadbare blanket. The apartment might be rundown and in a dangerous part of the city, but the cat seems to have found a sense of home and comfort amidst the chaos.
Overall, the output is mostly garbage. I asked it too many things which it confused the model. Although some of details are fantastic.
Crumbling concrete walls, the elevator is out of order, windows are boarded up, the flickering neon sign, a makeshift computer set up on a rickety table, wires and circuit boards spilling out from the sides, the cat purring contently on the threadbare blanket.
With a few tweaks those are usable. You could use those details to re-write the paragraph and make it fantastic.
Anyway. There’s a lot of things that Chat GPT can do, and I encourage everyone to test it out and play around with prompts while the service remains free. At some point they will start charging for it, and it will become expensive to experiment. Think of this period as free training.
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