Ask HN: How are you using ChatGPT for yourself?
I'll start: it became my notes app, because I can have insights on the notes I'm taking. Not an ideal use case, but it is fun for side projects ideas.
Example, I was fiddling with a PGN project idea while waiting for the Christmas dinner: https://chat.openai.com/share/eb975eaa-1c37-413f-a6a0-b17eb2f1bdf3
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] thread* A story bible (asking questions about characters, timelines, plot points, etc that I might have forgotten)
* A brainstorming tool that uses existing themes and characters for new ideas
* A rudimentary developmental editor or critic (does not replace my human dev editor, however)
* A character and environment art generator (this one is hit and miss with characters especially)
Tip for anyone doing this: make a separate GPT for each series. When I tried to upload books in two distinct series, even clearly labelled in the data, it started getting them confused. Works better to split them up.
So assuming you want the super low barrier to entry ChatGPT way, you'll need GPT Plus ($10/month). From there, you will go to this page: https://chat.openai.com/gpts/mine
This will list your custom GPTs. You will click on "Create a GPT". The GPT Editor will ask you for some information about your GPT. Keep in mind that GPT Plus comes with an hourly rate limit, and the creation conversation itself uses your GPT 4.0 quota... So you can _also_ just go to the "Configure" tab on that creation page and put in your prompts directly (this does not use your GPT 4.0 quota). Here's mine, for example:
"Description: A sci-fi romance writing assistant."
"Instructions: 'Assistant-Name' is a specialized writing assistant and professional developmental editor for the 'Series-Name' series, focusing on elements like steamy romance, dark themes, space exploration, power plays, sensuality, futuristic technologies, and aliens. This GPT will provide insights and suggestions aligned with these themes, ensuring that discussions and brainstorming sessions enhance the unique character of the series. It will avoid veering into unrelated genres or themes. The assistant is designed to recall specific details from the series, assist in developing plotlines and characters, and provide creative ideas that align with the established universe of 'Series-Name.' It will adopt a tone that resonates with the series' themes, being insightful, a bit edgy, and deeply engaged with the elements of dark sci-fi romance."
On that same "Configuration" tab, you can upload your knowledge base. In my case, that is each book in the series in .docx or PDF format. Tick the box that says "DALL-E Image Generation" and optionally "Web browsing" if desired.
Under the "Additional Settings" (hidden by default) config options, I unticked the "Use conversation data in your GPT to improve our models" checkbox. Just personal preference.
You can try out the assistant before saving.
It's excellent at Socratic dialogue.
I sometimes use it to solve actual problems I'm having otherwise, usually software design related, and more recently involving Stable Diffusion since its April 2023 update.
https://github.com/lllyasviel/Fooocus
Highly recommend.
>"Looking up from the deck of golden gate bridge at the towers and metal work, the towers rise and arch back in an ominous and foreboding manner. more artistic, like an alphonse mucha propaganda poster - slightly fish-eye feeling" -- https://i.imgur.com/vyNg79f.jpg
the local UI and 1.27.0.0.1 - https://i.imgur.com/wRwghuN.jpg
an awkward chrismas card generator
https://chat.openai.com/g/g-yzSEhwyJM-awkward-sweet-christma...
Christmas Dev Support
https://chat.openai.com/g/g-4AoVA5xhf-christmas-free-dev-sup...
My Personal Doctor
https://chat.openai.com/g/g-2v2gNkuad-doctair-free-medical-a...
My Yoga Buddy
https://chat.openai.com/g/g-SpeE49i2D-swami-vivekananda-gpt
The christmas card it generated wasn't even that awkward but very usable
* writing blog posts and outline for blog posts
* writing SEO descriptions
Generally though, its output was just a starting point, and I'd have to make a lot of edits of my own to actually include something of a writer's voice, remove any errors, etc.
I also found it fun to use ChatGPT to generate descriptive 'image alt text' for scenes and then plug that text into ComfyUI and A1111 to generate images. There were some cases where I was generating patterns and would use it to give me long lists of ideas for things, like I'll ask it "give me 20 ideas for christmas-themed patterns" and it spits out a bunch of stuff like "merry reindeer." Some of it isn't exactly usable, but it's also easier to have ChatGPT generate 100+ ideas than to do that yourself, which becomes pretty tedious past ten (for me).
I'm looking into using it for language learning, although I trust it less than something like Duolingo, which I already don't trust. I'm wondering how I can 'chat' with it in a different language and make sure that it correctly corrects my grammar and is also using proper grammar itself. Not sure how useful that could be, but if anyone else has had success with this, I'm interested in hearing how.
In general, I tend to ask Chat GPT questions when: 1: I don't know what to search for, and 2: When I need it to aggregate and interpret context.
I personally am not using Chat GPT daily. I find that I still prefer searching, because often I'm either trying to find a specific website; or the human discussion provides a lot more insight than ChatGPT can give me.
-I use it to clean up emails for work (paste in email, ask it to formalize it or make it more clear)
-My wife used it yesterday to create a rhyming scavenger hunt for the kids
-create Chrome extensions (tip, make sure it uses manifest version 3)
-I use it to create themed Teams video backgrounds
-Used it to create survey questions for Work From Home feedback for my staff.
Lots of other random uses as well. I've been a paying member since the start and it still blows my mind everytime I use it.
My first extension is effectively a real time cheater for Wordle in the browser. I will have it published by the end of the month and fingers crossed I can make this cross platform as well as iOS app. If nothing else, I just want to learn more about building browser extensions.
I mostly get my results by simply conversing with it like I would a person. Tell it what you are seeing and what is wrong (ex "The font displayed on the screen should be larger and centered on the screen."). You can also ask it to start logging errors to the console, then simply copy and pasting the error and ask GPT what is wrong and how to improve it. Another tip is to provide some custom instructions in your profile and ask it to always provide the full code when updating particular sections. Without this, it will just give you the small snippet you need to update and you have to figure out where that goes. Probably not a bad idea to tell it to always use manifest V3 when creating extensions (there are some structural changes which would brick your extension when the migration occurs in June 2024. When you are done, you can also ask it for instructions on publishing your extension in addition to creating your icon set with Dall-e for example. If you want to charge for your extension, I think there is a tool called ExtensionPay which provides an API. ChatGPT might be able to incorporate that code (I haven't tried that yet though).
My email is in my profile if you want to chat more.
It's not top on the Open LLM leaderboards but it's worked well for me. Haven't had a chance to look at Mixtral but this is the one I'd try first - https://huggingface.co/Open-Orca/Mixtral-SlimOrca-8x7B.
To me the best one right now is neuralhermes 2.5, check out how I was able to teach it basic function calling in the system prompt: https://huggingface.co/mlabonne/NeuralHermes-2.5-Mistral-7B/...
But, now that you mention it, that's pretty much the future.
It will be better at serving ads than Google ever was.
So that's how Google fell...
With the power of its Gemini - Google was able to inject product ranking placement tokens into any prompt sent through its tentacles to the deep blue datacenter where, beneath the North Sea sits a kraken of subliminal advertising.
The new concept is to put secret subliminal ads in the responses AI makes across the board in order to secretly drive sentiment while the users believe they are educating themselves, they are secretly indoctrinating themselves to be the clickslaves Google sees them to be.
--
I just installed this last night on my laptop:
https://github.com/lllyasviel/Fooocus
Highly recommend:
>"Looking up from the deck of golden gate bridge at the towers and metal work, the towers rise and arch back in an ominous and foreboding manner. more artistic, like an alphonse mucha propaganda poster - slightly fish-eye feeling" -- https://i.imgur.com/vyNg79f.jpg
the local UI and 1.27.0.0.1 - https://i.imgur.com/wRwghuN.jpg
You'll need:
> A 2kg leg of lamb from Bob & Mary's Finest Cuts [Maps Link]
> A bottle of Yarden Merlot [Buy Online] or [Maps link]
> Four organic red onions from [Maps link]
> ...
> [Click here] to order all the ingredients and have them by 6pm, after checkout I'll provide the cooking instructions.
Thank you for using ChefGPT Free!
Already have all the required ingredients? Upgrade to ChefGPT Plus and get the recipe in seconds!
link: https://ropuz.com
and using chatGPT webapp for code and almost everything.
I don't know if this is feeding into the training data or not but I hope that it is.
Sounds like OP is just running tit-for-tat.
Apart from that, censoring what one's web service can be used for is a very common CYA strategy to avoid damage to the brand and not causing governments to push through overtly harsh laws.
Differently from social networks, model censoring does not even remotely restrict anyones constitutional rights. And who really wants to run big uncensored models can just use open source ones (which are approaching GPT 3.5 performance) and run them on 2nd hand GPUs from ebay since for LLMs bulk VRAM is more important than raw processing speed.
I tried using it for coding but it made up APIs constantly or had subtle errors. I don't know what people mean when they say it works for them. I can see it help as an icebreaker though. It just helps me get in the mood sometimes.
Other factual stuff ex nutrition questions, health stuff, historic events etc it's quite useless.
I am an LLM skeptic. I think there're a lot of people who're claiming that they find it valuable just like crypto was claimed to be valuable
Personally I'm in the same camp as you - I don't use it. It wasn't able to really help me do anything I do. But I can appreciate that it works for people different from me, good for them.
This has been my experience so far as well. I also find it very tiring to have to review all the iterations of the code.
I do find GitHub Copilot quite valuable at work, especially when it recommends one liners (they are easy to review, so I just feel like I'm writing faster).
To be fair to ChatGPT, on one of my recent experiment it actually said something along the lines of "you need to integrate with the library/API yourself", and it only started spewing garbage after I insisted to write the code. I see a lot of people online complaining that GPT is getting lazy, but I would rather have it lazy than wrong.
But I may get into it from a SaaS perspective eg. get into the hype since there are customers.
- Generating boilerplate code for a process - saving time and then just customizing basic code after feeding it an idea and some basic requirements
- Troubleshooting - especially on systems I'm not familiar with - this often gets me 95% of the way to a solution. Obviously not just copying & pasting scripts it spits out, but it's been very good at figuring out some obscure linux issues, oracle config issues, even 3rd party integration software.
- Meal prepping - give it a list of ingredients and preferences and have it spit out a plan on how to portion it out, make each different meal roughly equal nutrition-wise, plan out when and how to cook each piece on a day to make it the most efficient, and even generate a shopping list. Output it into a nice table and the hardest part is done.
I’m sure it’s hallucinated a few times, but I’m at such an early level that it’s typically fine. I learn either way in a way that’s set me way ahead of where I’d have been without it
At work we get pressured to write comments backing up our ratings on performance appraisals. Not just the overall performance, but aspects such as if the employee communicates effectively, works well with others, etc.. ChatGPT is good at generating those without sounding too repetitive.
I've also occasionally used it to generate a meal plan following a my diet.
For example, "Give me a quick Python script that opens a window with PyQt5", or "Split a string on spaces in Emacs Lisp".
It's pretty much flawless for basic stuff like that.
Interviewer: "Quick, how to do a global search and replace in VI!"
ME, blanking: "...I'd.... google it..."
Interviewer: "best answer!"
(wound up not getting job for not having a degree, and Sergey was still personally signing off on all hires, according to them... (after they told me they were sending me an offer in the morning))
Just having a memory for a sec - some other notable interview moments:
Google: "What kind of company do you think Google is? (2007)
Me: "People think you're a search engine, but youre really just an advertising company."
And at twitter: "What kind of company do you think twitter is?" (~2011?)
Me: "I think you are a global sentiment engine"
(Didn't get the job allegedly because "I didnt read enough industry news" (seriously made what I read a big deal in the interview - and I fumbled trying to think of all the various things I read - this interview seemed to be looking for what physical publications I read, like DataCenter rags and such (I was a pretty successful datacenter design-team consultant at them time))
Also used for boilerplate code stuff.