What insights did a year with ChatGPT provide brilliance or foolishness?

As the tool evolves from a source of curiosity to a daily companion, enthusiasts delve into its possibilities and discover its limitations.

As ChatGPT approaches its one-year milestone, marking a period where AI shifted from a futuristic idea to an everyday reality, concerns have emerged regarding issues such as job displacement, disinformation, and plagiarism. Despite these universal concerns, millions of users have embraced the platform, exploring its potential to simplify various aspects of their lives.

Since its inception, users initially engaged with ChatGPT for its playful capabilities, asking it to play 20 questions or create original songs. Now, approaching its first anniversary, people are employing it for a wide range of tasks. While common applications include drafting emails, composing student essays, and crafting cover letters, with the right prompts, it can address more specialized yet equally practical tasks in everyday life. Here are a few examples that could prove useful.

Decipherer of technical language

During a professional meeting, financial professionals delve into GAAP operating income for the fourth quarter of the fiscal year 2022, designers voice worries about kerning, and the CEO requests a comprehensive examination of specific matters. Furthermore, your British supervisor commends your work as “quite good” with a hint of dissatisfaction, while your American coworker lauds everything as amazing. Users share that they employ ChatGPT as a tool to clarify workplace jargon, ensuring a common understanding of the issues raised.

Unrelenting evaluator

From time to time, individuals seek an objective evaluation of their work, a frank assessment that close friends and family might withhold due to their inclination towards kindness. For certain people, ChatGPT serves as that evaluator, though the label “real” in this context remains a subject of debate. A Reddit copywriter shared, “I use ChatGPT to thoroughly evaluate how my copy aligns with the audience’s expectations.” Some have found it capable of providing reasonably constructive (albeit not flawless) feedback on fiction writing, identifying redundancies, insufficient character development, or weak imagery.

Ethical considerations arise regarding the use of ChatGPT in professional and educational settings. In response, some argue that employing it as a critic, and learning from its feedback, is a means of enhancing writing skills without allowing it to dictate the words. It’s not always a straightforward process; the feedback received depends entirely on the prompt’s structure. Some users find it challenging to guide it to be sufficiently critical, and more precise feedback is often obtained by presenting a detailed task, such as “I’m crafting a college essay – assess its structure and clarity.”

A robot experiencing emotions

Some users turn to ChatGPT for help in crafting more diplomatic work emails, especially when aiming to convey their message without sounding confrontational.

Assistant in the kitchen

It’s dinner time, and your kitchen holds a half-eaten yogurt, a leftover chicken leg, a bag of flour, and some almost-forgotten tomatoes that are losing their appeal. Users have reported that ChatGPT helps them create impressive meals from available ingredients or generates ideas based on pantry contents and a specified grocery budget. While some recipes may seem unconventional—such as garbanzo bean and cheddar cheese soup, a peanut butter and Nutella quesadilla, or a “carrot and grape salad with muesli crunch” inspired by my own kitchen—it’s clear that users find satisfaction in the outcomes.