How to Use AI Effectively

An article we liked from Thought Leader Ethan Mollick:

How to use AI to do practical stuff: A new guide

People often ask me how to use AI. Here's an overview with lots of links.

We live in an era of practical AI, but many people haven’t yet experienced it, or, if they have, they might have wondered what the big deal is. Thus, this guide. It is a modified version of one I put out for my students earlier in the year, but a lot has changed. It is an overview of ways to get AI to do practical things.

Why people keep missing what AI can do.

Large Language Models like ChatGPT are extremely powerful, but are built in a way that encourages people to use them in the wrong way. When I talk to people who tried ChatGPT but didn’t find it useful, I tend to hear a similar story.

The first thing people try to do with AI is what it is worst at; using it like Google: tell me about my company, look up my name, and so on. These answers are terrible. Many of the models are not connected to the internet, and even the ones that are make up facts. AI is not Google. So people leave disappointed.

Second, they may try something speculative, using it like Alexa, and asking a question, often about the AI itself. Will AI take my job? What do you like to eat? These answers are also terrible. With one exception, most of the AI systems have no personality, are not programmed to be fun like Alexa, and are not an oracle for the future. So people leave disappointed.

If people still stick around, they start to ask more interesting questions, either for fun or based on half-remembered college essay prompts: Write an article on why ducks are the best bird. Why is Catcher in the Rye a good novel? These are better. As a result, people see blocks of text on a topic they don’t care about very much, and it is fine. Or the see text on something they are an expert in, and notice gaps. But it not that useful, or incredibly well-written. They usually quit around now, convinced that everyone is going to use this to cheat at school, but not much else.

All of these uses are not what AI is actually good at, and how it can be helpful. They can blind you to the real power of these tools. I want to try to show you some of why AI is powerful, in ways both exciting and anxiety-producing.

The Six Large Language Models

To start, lets introduce the six Large Language Models available right now, all for somewhere between free and $20 a month.

The first four (including Bing) are all OpenAI systems. There are basically two major OpenAI AIs today: 3.5 and 4. The 3.5 model kicked off the current AI craze in November, the 4 model just premiered and is much more powerful. A new variation uses plugins to connect to the internet and other apps, but it is only in early testing. If you have never paid for OpenAI, you have only used 3.5. Aside from the plugins variation, none of these models are connected to the internet.

Microsoft’s Bing uses a mix of 4 and 3.5. It is connected to the internet. Bing is a bit weird to use, but powerful. Here is my guide to using it. In addition, Google has released a disappointing AI called Bard (though they may show us more impressive models soon) and Anthropic has released Claude, though it is more focused at business users. So what can you do with these things?

Write stuff

Open Source Option: None yet (but stay tuned)
Best free option: Bing and ChatGPT 3.5
Paid option: ChatGPT 4.0/ChatGPT with plugins

For right now, no other general AI tool comes even close to GPT-4, which you can access at Bing for free or by purchasing a $20/month subscription to ChatGPT. GPT-3.5 is also good at writing and is much faster. I have experimented a lot on how to use AI to help with written material, so here is a list of way you might find it useful:

Writing anything. Blog posts, essays, promotional material, speeches, lectures, chose-you-own adventures, scripts, short stories - you name it, it does it. But you can’t just give it basic prompts. Basic prompts result in boring writing. Getting good writing out of ChatGPT takes some practice, and here is a guide to doing that. ChatGPT-4 is much better at writing. Bing can be incredible at writing, but needs some convincing.
Make your writing better. Paste your text into ChatGPT. Ask it to improve the content or for suggestions about how to make it better for a particular audience. Ask it to create 10 drafts in radically different styles. Ask it to make things more vivid, or add examples. (though note it only “remembers” a couple thousand words of text)
Help you with tasks. AI can write emails, create sales templates, give you next steps in a business plan, and a lot more. Here is what I could accomplish with it in 30 minutes.
Unblock yourself. It is very easy to get distracted from a task by one difficult challenge. AI provides a way of giving yourself momentum.

Some things to worry about: In a bid to respond to your answers, it is very easy for the AI to “hallucinate” and generate plausible facts. It can generate entirely false content that is utterly convincing. Let me emphasize that: AI lies continuously and well. Every fact or piece of information it tells you may be incorrect. You will need to check it all. Particularly dangerous is...