Most people visit ChatGPT, create an account, type in something, are amazed by the results, and then move on. But how could you actually use it for real?

One obvious use case is “homework cheating”: copy-paste entire pieces of text to save time and effort. But the results will still be a bit impersonal. (I suspect that in future versions of the program, you could feed it your own writing style so that the bot adjusts to you personally, the back archive of my blog since 2008 would be great for that :-))

But there are a few others:

• The bot answer might be a great way to get a basic structure/setup for your text. You copy they layout of the argument to start, but then fill in the paragraphs with your own language.

• The algorithm can create a check list to see whether you covered everything that should be covered

• ChatGPT can be better than Google to get tutorials or “how to” articles. At the moment the pages that are best optimized for search engines float to the top. This might not always be the best articles. ChatGPT has read them all and will summarize them for you.

• The software can be a great source of examples or analogies that you would not have thought of.

“Google it” is now an essential part of writing pretty much anything. “ChatGPT it” will have to be added to the list.

CONFESSION: Yesterday’s post about the use of humor in presentations was a complete homework cheat…