- Think of GPT as your personal librarian. It can do an insane amount of research in a short amount of time, so long as you tell it exactly what you need. But definitely don’t expect it to do your writing for you.
- When it comes to research, the biggest efficiency gains from GPT come while reading old (but popular) books that are hard to understand, either because the writing isn’t clear or requires a lot of background knowledge.
- GPT has a knack for summarizing and simplifying, so use it to wade through long and jargon-filled papers.
- If you’re stuck on a sentence and know you can improve it but don’t know how, ask GPT to rewrite it for you in the style of 3-5 authors you admire. I rarely copy & paste what GPT gives me though. Instead, I use it to improve what I’ve already written. GPT can’t write face-melting prose or an entire masterpiece, but it can definitely help you craft better sentences.
- If you hate looking for typos as much as I do, ask GPT to check for them before you ship off something important.
- Talk to GPT like you’re texting a friend. Conversations lubricate the mind and release us from repetitive cycles that block our thinking. Many of my best ideas come from reacting to something instead of trying to think up an idea from scratch. In addition to talking to people, I now throw questions at GPT like I’m talking to an expert.
- If you aren’t happy with GPT’s response, your prompt probably isn’t clear or specific enough.
- The more specific your request, the better the output will be. Names are particularly useful because GPT can instantly pull from somebody’s full body of work to mimic their style. A writer’s name packs a lot of information in a few words, much of which is subtle and hard-to-describe, which makes it an efficient, high-octane carrier of information.
- If ChatGPT is onto something good, you’ll get a lot of mileage out of the words “say more.”
- ChatGPT isn't as smart as the best person who could answer your question, but it goes God Mode on three other dimensions: diversity, accessibility, and speed. You can have a conversation with a bunch of different people at once, it’s very cheap, and the responses are nearly instant.
- I like Tyler Cowen’s idea that GPT gives computers a facility with words that they’ve long had with numbers.
- Use GPT to unblock yourself and delegate tedious tasks. Like any research assistant, it has its quirks. It reads and writes at the speed of light, but gets stuff wrong more than I wish it did. And you have to check its work because it tries to sound smart even when it’s BS-ing.
Oh, and one more recommendation. When I’m stuck on a sentence, I have a handful of go-to writers whose style I ask GPT to mimic:
- Poets, like David Whyte, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Mary Oliver
- Novelists, like Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, David Foster Wallace, Amor Towles, and Anthony Doerr
- Non-fiction writers, like Morgan Housel, Nassim Taleb, and Bill Bryson
- Funny writers, like P.G. Wodehouse and David Sedaris
- Copywriters, like David Ogilvy, Eugene Schwartz and Gary Halbert
- Wildcards like James Joyce, Marshall McLuhan, Nietzsche, Hunter S. Thompson, Vladimir Nabokov, and Oscar Wilde.
The point isn’t to copy what it writes. Rather, the point is to generate ideas by seeing all the ways you could possibly write a sentence.
- Mind-blowing prose
- Stunning writing
- Captivating narration
- Impressive storytelling
