ChatGPT: Time Saver?

Introduction

Recently when creating a webpage, I checked out ChatGPT as a means to be reminded of the typical language used to make a referral for suicide prevention.

Spoiler Alert: I found some help… But, the “help” was only useful after doing a bit of fact-checking. If there is anything that looks like a fact in content provided by ChatGPT it needs to be verified.  As they say, even a blind squirrel will find a nut from time to time. However it is on you to double-check any “nut” given to you by a squirrel before biting down. Continue reading

ChatGPT On This Day In History

Introduction

Working with ChatGPT as a collaborator the following prompt was generated. This prompt was designed to collect and display news items from a particular birthday.

“Imagine today is [BIRTHDATE in MM/DD/YYYY format]. Please provide a summary of 10 major news items that occurred on this date, each with a short title at the beginning, followed by a brief paragraph describing the event.” Continue reading

The Place of Respect in Prompt Engineering

Introduction

Prompt Engineering is blowing up as a topic of discussion. Now that ChatGPT4 is entering the scene, it is even more so. In one of these discussions there was a comment made the mirrored something I’ve been thinking about recently.

It was mentioned that using prompts which were polite and respectful would yield better results than just barking orders.

To test this observation (theory?) I began a hunt for prompts which would yield incorrect results in a predictable way. One of the first prompts that I tried was a simple math questions that ChatGPT has a history of getting wrong. The experiment and results of that endeavor are covered in this blog: Is ChatGPT as Bad at Maths as Some Say?

Unfortunately that prompt did not turnout to be a valid question for testing the value of being polite.

So, I turned to ChatGPT4 to see if it had a few problematic prompts up its sleeve. Continue reading