danganiev.meNavigate back to the homepage

Three uses for ChatGPT I find helpful

Dan Ganiev
March 30th, 2023 · 1 min read
Image of a "A lively marketplace teeming with people and futuristic technology", rendered by Midjourney. Idea and prompt generated by ChatGPT. Yes it is that meta. I just basically pressed Enter.

It can summarize books and their parts

Are you tired of spending hours trying to condense the juicy details of a book into a concise summary? Welcome to the magical world of ChatGPT, the technological Narnia where your books will be summarized like never before. This AI-powered wonder has the ability to turn your reading experience into a seamless adventure.

- ChatGPT in the style of me

ChatGPT has read a lot of books, and is ready to spill their contents in a short form right onto your displays. It can summarize whole books, their parts, or chapters. You can also feed it the pages of the book you are currently reading, if the pasted length does not exceed 25000 tokens. Since ChatGPT does not know about any books that came out after year 2021, this can help you summarize new books yourself. This is immensely helpful when you need to refresh a book in your memory without having to reread it.

Example prompts:

1Can you summarize the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" in five paragraphs?
1Can you summarize the third part of the book "Thinking in Systems" in five paragraphs?
1Can you summarize the following text in three paragraphs:
2[Insert two to three book pages of content here]

It can be your CBT guide in addition to mental therapy

Note how I didn’t use the word “therapist” here, because that would be an overstatement. So, a disclaimer here: I’ve only tried this for CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy), and only for light mental issues I already knew about (like burnout from work). ChatGPT can’t replace a real therapist (yet), so don’t hesitate to find one if you are struggling.

Cognitive behavioural therapy is probably the most algorithmized form of mental therapy, so language models are naturally good at it. I’ve used it to refresh the rules of CBT in my head, and reminisce about automatic negative thoughts. Then I just ask the bot what would be the best way to manage specific thoughts of anxiety or stress, and it provides a list of actions to take.

For example, one of the provided points for managing anxiety was progressive muscle relaxation, which is a studied and known method to battle anxiety. It also really helps that chat history is readily available, so you can reread it and continue the chat at any moment.

Example prompts (asked continuously in a single session):

1Can you run a CBT session for me? I've been working for 16 hours per day,
2after which a COVID triggered some sort of burnout for me, and I didn't have any
3motivation to do anything for three weeks. I also started to drink alcohol and
4smoke regularly, both of which I never used to do regularly before.
1What parts of life are under my control?
1I tend to think that reading the news and messages in Telegram gives me an edge
2and feeling of control, although it is not true. How could I change my thinking
3using CBT methods?

It can generate prompts for other AIs, and even content ideas

If you know one good prompt for an AI, you can use ChatGPT to multiply them faster than bacteria. Ok, maybe not that fast, but faster than rabbits for sure.

You just provide a template prompt, and ask to fill the gaps. It will even generate an idea for the prompt, if you tune your master prompt right. I’ve generated prompts for Midjourney, but I’m sure you can ask ChatGPT to generate prompts for itself too.

Example prompt (courtesy of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLG-qtZwxIw):

1I want you to act as a prompt engineer. You will help me write prompts for an ai art generator called Midjourney.
2
3I will provide you with short content ideas and your job is to elaborate these into full, explicit, coherent prompts.
4
5Prompts involve describing the content and style of images in concise accurate language. It is useful to be explicit and use references to popular culture, artists and mediums. Your focus needs to be on nouns and adjectives. I will give you some example prompts for your reference. Please define the exact camera that should be used
6Here is a formula for you to use(content insert nouns here)(medium: insert artistic medium here)(style: insert references to genres, artists and popular culture here)(lighting, reference the lighting here)(colours reference color styles and palettes here)(composition: reference cameras, specific lenses, shot types and positional elements here)
7when giving a prompt remove the brackets, speak in natural language and be more specific, use precise, articulate language.
8always output me two full prompt options that are different

More articles from Dan Ganiev

The productive ritual of listening to a single song

I can not work without music. Ever since I started to code, I needed some musical accompaniment to do it well. And I finally found the most…

May 10th, 2022 · 2 min read

GraphQL is becoming more than just a query language for the web

GraphQL might have started as a convenient way of delivering exactly the right amount of data from server to the client. But...

September 1st, 2021 · 2 min read
© 2021 - ∞ Dan Ganiev
Link to $https://twitter.com/GanievDanLink to $https://github.com/danganievLink to $https://instagram.com/some_kind_of_dan