AI was truly useful for me today

AI intelligence comic

I had to do something for a consulting job and gave AI a stab at it to see if it could come up with anything useful. I have to say it was useful.

Why am I sharing this? In the past, I had limited success with AI but don’t use it every day. I didn’t find it to be compelling and I thought I could do something better myself. However today it provided exactly what I needed and did it in a matter of seconds rather than hours. That was pretty awesome.

AI intelligence comic
AI intelligence comic

I used the free open version of ChatGPT and I had to try a few prompts to get what I wanted. The first was fine but too general. The second was better and the third was perfect. Well perhaps not perfect, but adequate for the client and good enough for a beginning point for the meeting I will have to discuss it. If this keeps up writers will be out of jobs in a few years.

Why was there a leap in performance? I think it’s because it is getting better at the intentions that people want when they type a prompt in. If you are careful with language you can focus the output on what you want, even if it takes a few tries. Interestingly I said at one prompt “More detail on the above please” and it understood and did that. I try to put in crazy language that I think it may not understand but so far it is doing better at understanding. Yes, I could have made the prompt shorter, but I am always going to be polite even if it is an AI.

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If you felt negative about AI in the past, give it another try. You might be surprised how either your standards are lowering, or AI is improving.