ChatGPT is one year old this week, and much has changed in the short time its been with us.

As author of Getting Started on ChatGPT and AI Chatbots Mark Pesce explained to this weeks masterclass there now a Big 4 of AI Chatbots, and just this week Amazon launched another called Q, its artificial intelligence (AI) helper for business users.

The Big 4 are:

• OpenAI ChatGPT which comes in different flavours of which the paid ChatGPT-4 is best

• Microsoft Copilot which is free and based on GPT-4 & 3.5. Every Windows 11 system has received an always-on upgrade to Copilot, with Windows 10 coming soon

• Google Bard which is free and integrated into GSuite

• Anthropic Claude which is comparable to GPT-4 (and priced similarly) and is a Google-backed AI startup founded by former OpenAI engineers

Do AI chatbots think?

No, chatbots are not thinking, says Mark. At times theyre not truthful and they have no way of being able to know this. A completely wrong response is called a hallucination or a confabulation.

AI chatbots use generative AI which is recognising patterns in massive amounts of data thats been fed into the models (including the false and nasty stuff) and then using them to create new data with similar characteristics.

How do I know if my chatbot is hallucinating or lying?

Chatbots work best with direct and specific questions. However, if you dont know the subject matter yourself, dont trust your chatbot, says Mark. It may have made a best guess as to the answer.

Mark suggests you can check if the chatbot is lying by asking the same question again but in a completely different way. Be less vague, says Mark, or give an example or two. Do you get the same response?

You could also try checking your chatbots answers against other those from other chatbots. You could do a normal Google search.

Or, you could ask a human who is expert in the subject.

What is a prompt and which prompts get the best results?

Prompt is the word given to the question, statement, or instruction you give the chatbot.

As Mark said, chatbots like specific and direct questions. It helps to tell them to keep the answer brief with Be brief at the end of each prompt. It also helps to give Character + Context + Challenge.

Character

First, get your chatbot into character. Think of your prompt as a tiny story.

For example, your prompt could read:

You are a world-class CFO. Over your career youve come up the ranks, managing the finances for a wide range of businesses in the service, manufacturing and retailing sectors.

When you put the chatbot into character you help it sift through vast amounts of data.

Be aware that asking it to be characters such as a statistician, social media influencer, or cybersecurity expert may come with higher risks as they may offer answers that are wildly inaccurate or, as Mark says, off the rails.

Again, if its not your area of expertise, check answers.

Context

You have a character, now give it context.

Today youre confronted with some hard choices. You need to cut costs by five percent over the remainder of the fiscal year and you want to minimise impacts on both staff and customers.

Challenge

Finally, set your chatbot its challenge.

Create three scenarios on cost-cutting alternatives and their impacts on the business. Explain your choices.

Have a play, try it yourself, and read our article from Mark Pesces original masterclass in July on crafting compelling interactions with chatbots. on using ChatGPT

Chatbots are useful for reasoning and summarising

Mark says he uses this feature a lot himself, as chatbots are very useful for summarising documents in text, Word, PDF and other formats.

Upload the document to the chatbot and ask the chatbot to provide a summary with 5 key points, or a summary in 500 words, or in dot points, or in one line of text.

Chatbots can also analyse a spreadsheet, a presentation, and other kinds of documents. Mark suggests try it and see!

Take care what you share

Mark made this point throughout his presentation. If you dont want it shouted from the rooftops, dont type it into a chatbot.

Chatbots upload your prompts and documents into the cloud and this means they could end up in anyones hands.

Mark also mentioned something called a prompt injection which is a cyberattack tool that recently emerged as a security threat issue.

Anything you upload to an AI chatbot can contain hidden prompts for that chatbot. In essence, a hacker might insert hidden instructions into the AI so it becomes a poisoned search. There is currently no strategy around how to avoid that.

Turning mountains into molehills

One of the newest technologies is the Autonomous Agent. It converses with the AI chatbot, checking the answers (Does this look right?) and reflecting its opinion back and forth until it gets to That looks like the answer.

This is the cutting edge of whats possible, says Mark, and its expected Autonomous Agents will turn a lot of mountains into molehills for humans. He says that with these tools a person will have more skills to complete a broader range of tasks.

Image generators

Some chatbots now offer image generators, and Mark showed examples of its efforts to create an image that puts a Santa on a beach. He asked it to add snow and sparkles, which it did very effectively. Mark says such images cant be copyrighted because they were not created by a human.

Working with AI

Given AI chatbots can lie, hallucinate, and may keep copies of everything you give them, its worth treating them with caution, and putting thought into how your business can and should work with AI chatbots like ChatGPT.

Mark suggests you should discuss as a team or as an organisation:

• Policies : When do we use it? What problems to we want to solve? Where do we want to use it. Where not?

• Procedures : How do we use it? What are the best prompts? What character and context do we use?

• Protocols : What happens if it goes wrong?

A thank you and closer from ChatGPT-4 itself

This article was written by a human (hi fellow human reader!!) without any help from ChatGPT, but I thought it would be fun to prompt ChatGPT to imagine it was a speaker who'd just done a presentation on this subject, and write a short thank you and summary to close out the piece.

Note, I did not feed this article into the chatbot before asking for this.

So, let me hand over to ChatGPT.take it away birthday bot..

Ladies and gentlemen, I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to all of you for being a part of this insightful discussion on ChatGPT and AI chatbots today. It's been a pleasure sharing this journey into the world of artificial intelligence and its transformative potential.

In closing, let's remember that AI chatbots are not just about technology; they're about enhancing human experiences, improving efficiency, and opening up new possibilities. They can revolutionize customer support, streamline processes, and empower businesses to connect with their customers on a deeper level.

As we embrace this technology responsibly, let's keep in mind that the future of AI chatbots is in our hands, and together, we can shape it for the better. Thank you once again for your time and attention.

Thanks ChatGPT! Human signing off and thanking you also.

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