Genuine uses for AI / GPT

[Ozzy]

What's this? A post about using AI in your business and the OP isn't trying to sell you something??!!
No that opening sentence was not written by AI, but as someone who has recently started diving head first deep into using various AI tools I've been impressed and want to ask how everyone else here is using AI and might even build this out into a support guide for members.

I personally started watching a load of YouTube videos and seeing how it can be used then played with Bard, ChatGPT and a couple of other tools before upgrading to paid use fo ChatGPT4 and started building my own GPT's configuring them on tone of voice, objectives and so on... and I got to say, I am really impressed.
For anyone who hasn't dabbled with this of course I'm happy to share, but would also like to hear how anyone else has used these tools whether image creation, writing or help with programming and such.

 

[IanSuth]

Have used it to create first drafts of marketing literature/adverts/tweats etc but always rewrite to make it more human afterwards

 

[Ozzy]

Have used it to create first drafts of marketing literature/adverts/tweats etc but always rewrite to make it more human afterwards

Do you use custom prompts?
By that I mean, how complex is the brief/question you give to I presume ChatGPT? I started out just asking the question or giving the brief, but over time I started adding in things like 'you are writing on behalf of X and your tone must be Y, you want the reader to feel Z. Do not use terms such as A or B, use language such as C'. Eventually it was easier to build my own customer ChatGPT all pre-configured.

 

[japancool]

I use ChatGPT to quickly translate product descriptions from Japanese into English.

Then I use it again to translate its output into British English...

I have also used it to write guides, although I haven't published any of them yet as I need to find time to edit them.

In my day job, I've been encouraged to use it to generate things like flow and heirarchy diagrams from descriptive text.

 

[Ozzy]

I have also used it to write guides, although I haven't published any of them yet as I need to find time to edit them.

What do you find needs editing in the guides? Is it technical errors or language used?

 

[IanSuth]

Do you use custom prompts?
By that I mean, how complex is the brief/question you give to I presume ChatGPT? I started out just asking the question or giving the brief, but over time I started adding in things like 'you are writing on behalf of X and your tone must be Y, you want the reader to feel Z. Do not use terms such as A or B, use language such as C'. Eventually it was easier to build my own customer ChatGPT all pre-configured.

Getting there - as you said, it is an iterative process

 

[japancool]

What do you find needs editing in the guides? Is it technical errors or language used?

A little bit of both. Sometimes, the information is just incorrect, or too generic to be of use. Language-wise, it mostly ok, but I edit it for clarity, and to make it less obviously AI generated.

Also, I insert links to product and category pages where relevant, or other pertinent information the AI missed.

 

[fisicx]

I gave it a good go along with copilot to write code. It sort of get the basics right but it took a lot of rework to get it to do what I wanted. It was quicker in the end to use code repositories and stackexchange.

I also tried using the tools to write guides but the results looked like marketing copy and missed a lot of the technical detail.

I’m sure there are lots of uses for ai writing tools but they didn’t work for me.

 

[Mark James]

I’ve used it to basically re-write my website especially my bi monthly news blogs with the sole intention of gearing it for my keyboards to enhance my SEO and I can wholeheartedly say it had 100% made a difference in terms of enquiries and rankings.

I’ve also got off a parking ticket using it ?.

Basically what it can write given the right info (and that’s the key) In literally under a minute is better than anything I could ever think of given a week and deep thought and tbh if ten of us were given this as a homework piece I doubt if any of us would beat it, yes you do have to go through it and tweak especially the z’s instead of s’s.

It is and will change the world and you would be silly not to embrace it and steer any young person especially your kids to learn it thoroughly not just for themselves but there will be lots of money making opportunities to be had with it.

 

[Shopclicks]

I've found MidJourney to be brilliant for graphics. I needed four animal images for a pet related website in a realistic but impressionist style (not cartoon style). I needed them to look like they had been created by the same artist. I created my prompt and simply swapped out the word cat for dog to create the next image and so on. Took about 5 mins.

I've used both ChatGPT & Bard for ideas for product category descriptions and blog posts. I find the raw results are far too generic and non-human but are great for prompting what I hadn't thought of.

I've used Eluna to try to create short infinite zoom videos from an image prompt but it has a long way to go before it's usable for me.

I've also been looking at Bing Chat for AI search results from an SEO perspective. Google's Search Generative Experience (AI assisted search) will be upon us shortly.

 

[Ozzy]

yes you do have to go through it and tweak especially the z’s instead of s’s

You can avoid needing to do this by telling the prompt to write for a UK audience in UK English. So now I don't need to do all these changes in the output for me.

I've found MidJourney to be brilliant for graphics.

Interesting, I will have to look at MidJourney as I've heard of it but never looked into that one. I tried Dall-E for the header image for my blog post I've just uploaded on here today and I didn't like the results, just looked too weird for me, so ended up going back and buying an image from Shutterstock as I always have.

 

[Paul Kelly ICHYB]

Just about to start using it to create some copy for a website that will be edited to make un-AI!

 

[japancool]

You can avoid needing to do this by telling the prompt to write for a UK audience in UK English. So now I don't need to do all these changes in the output for me.

I usually do that, but it sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Sometimes, I have to tell it three times to do it before it does. It's more reliable to tell it to rewrite it after it's generated the text.

I also use Bing Image Creator to create images for my FB business page. One of my suppliers has started doing this as well.

 

[UKSBD]

I've been using Copilot to generate a paragraph or two about things I am optimising for but then rewrite what it produces.

The only reason I rewrite is I'm still not sure if it is safe to use what it generates or whether it is just copying it exactly from the source.

Can you legally just use what these things generate or do you still have to be weary that it may just be copying from a rival website?

 

[fisicx]

Can you legally just use what these things generate or do you still have to be weary that it may just be copying from a rival website?

There are any number of court cases where authors, artists and developers are challenging the use of their material in the LLM.

You only have to look at sites like medium where members are just posting endless AI generated junk. Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon all to the eventual detriment of just about everything online. It will soon make all reviews worthless (because they will all be written by AI).

 

[Ozzy]

Can you legally just use what these things generate or do you still have to be weary that it may just be copying from a rival website?

My assumption, and it is just that, is that if you prompt some short like "write an article on how do you form a Limited company" then it will pretty much replicate what it found online somewhere.
However, if you prompt with some objective and other parameters then it will be bespoke and safer to use.

For example "Write me an article on how to form a Limited company in the UK comparing company formation agents and direct with Companies House, explain the ID verification requirement differences between the two. Your tone should be relaxed and friendly, but informative. You should explain any jargon, and encourage the reader to seek professional advice before making a final decision and that the reader should also consider that a sole trader may be a better option for them. In closing, guide the reader to visit the UK Business Forums business community to connect with other business owners and seek their advice and experience before making this exciting next step in starting their own business".

 

[Mark James]

Bang on

 

[japancool]

I had to do that when generating images. Took quite a few goes for it to get what I wanted. And Bing doesn't really understand "anime style".

 

[fisicx]

@Ozzy, does this mean all your article writers are really bots with AI generated avatars.

Are you in fact an ai entity. Living in the matrix? Does Neo know?

 

[Paul Kelly ICHYB]

Did you see the news last week about the woman who used AI to get some HMRC information re tribunal decisions? Turns out all of the cases she quoted were made up!

 

[Ozzy]

does this mean all your article writers are really bots with AI generated avatars

We are researching using AI to write the basic guides and evergreen, such as how to register a Ltd company type stuff but we will continue to have real people write the reactive content - such as news and budget led stuff.

I wanted ChatGPT to write this reply but it seems to dislike trying to impersonate someone, but then that is something an AI bot would say if it was trying to impersonate someone....

 

[14Steve14]

A while ago we tried using AI to write things like category descriptions for the website. Entering the correct things like keywords and other bits and the AI writer came up with some good sentences and paragraphs, although we did alter a lot of them to make them sound as it they were wrote by a human.

I did also input some text and got it to create a news article which we sent to some specialist magazines letting them know about some new and updated products. Again I thought it needed a bit of a rewrite just because of the way it came over when read.

We do use it to rewrite what we have in our weekly customer newsletters. At times it is good, but others it can sound a bit strange and make hard reading just by the language used, which many probably would not use. We have tried altering the type of text ew need form things like friendly to professional and it does give different results. Again some good, but others bad.

The final thing we tried was a website article on a specialist product that we sell explaining what it is, how to wire it, and how it can be used. The article contained lots of information which was mostly right, but in places duplicated the content which bulked the article but added nothing to it.

Apart from that, not really tried it with anything else. What we did find is that most things worked as we had hoped, but others seemed to need a human touch.

 

[UKSBD]

I'm too risk averse to just copy what it produces on my websites.

It gives me the text to alter on subjects I don't really know about though.

I think I'll just keep doing that rather than use it to auto generate content

 

[Ozzy]

My take is that is where it is currently, it makes really good progress and is almost perfect but not quite and always needs a little tweak. Saves loads of time but doesn't finish the job ?

One thing someone has recommended to me is to pass the output through Grammarly as that fixes a lot of the text before you need to manually run through it.

 

[japancool]

Don't use AI image generators to generate anything involving hands though, not unless you want your creations to look like the Simpsons or an eldritch abomination.

 

[Ozzy]

Don't use AI image generators to generate anything involving hands though, not unless you want your creations to look like the Simpsons or an eldritch abomination.

Will Smith eating speghetti

 

[SillyBill]

Its an incredible Personal Assistant basically. Like if I employed a human PA its not perfect either...Lots of us use it in my business as an aid. I think a lot of people trashing it likely feel threatened by it, and quite rightly too IMO. As if its this good now, we'll no doubt be amazed to see what it will doing in 10 years. And I've never had any more issue with its inaccuracy than I have done when surfing the web (most of which is garbage information afterall that needs to be vetted)...so what is the expectation exactly? It isn't replacing a human (at the moment at least), I read its output and I know enough about my subject matter to know when its wrong and when its right. If you don't know your stuff then don't expect AI to do your job, it can only support - its not a copy and paste tool, or a do everything for you.

I've found it such a time saver for mundane tasks, for instance I've been able do things such as write internal procedures in 5 minutes flat about how to do this or that (and then me just tailor edit it to our organisation/specific task). Something which took me 30-60 minutes before, written word by word, now done in 1/6th or 1/12th of the time. Written by AI, edited by a human. I am struggling to think of the stuff I'm not using it for or finding it helpful for TBH. We're fundamentally chemists and I find its chemical output pretty decent, if not with some errors but none of which I wouldn't pick up straight away. I find I can get starter-for-ten stuff out of it immediately to get projects going...this may have taken 30 minutes of trawling the web beforehand, so its not teaching me/us anything new but its certainly providing us with the get-off-the-mark information quicker.

We're now doing some internal training videos to save us the incessant power point presentation days delivering the same refresher training every year (PPE/fire awareness/H&S etc.), these don't need to be super polished as for internal use but we're so impressed with the quality even still... I'd have paid £thousands of k for this sort of output a year or two ago (and been delighted with it) and we're doing it ourselves for paid staff time now. We can write our own scripts, put an AI avatar on to deliver it, actually tailor the content directly to our business and processes (as opposed to buying generic training programmes online or reheated offsite training that is expensive and often poorly delivered). I would agree its probably not anything "new" for some on here who work with software everyday but for non-techy businesses like us it certainly is new for us to be able to deploy such powerful tools when we have almost no understanding of the under-the-bonnet mechanics. I know our spend with a lot of professional service providers is going to go down in the future because a lot of stuff we'd have prior outsourced we will do ourselves. We'll just outsource the hard bits in future. Like others, just getting it to re-write website copy or create different text for landing pages is really useful. I can see it reducing headcount quite a bit in the next few years in certain industries.

 

[Videoguy]

I use it mainly as a research tool. I'll have ChatGPT draw up a list of bullet points and create my own content off the back of that.

 

[japancool]

Well...

Relying on AI-written content can have both advantages and disadvantages, and it depends on the context and purpose of the content. Here are some considerations:

Advantages:

1. Efficiency: AI can generate content quickly and at scale. This is particularly useful for tasks such as content creation for websites, product descriptions, or basic informational articles.
2. Consistency: AI can maintain a consistent writing style and tone across a large volume of content, ensuring a cohesive brand voice.
3. Data Processing: AI can quickly analyze vast amounts of data to generate insights and summaries, making it useful for data-driven content.
4. Language Translation: AI can assist in translating content into different languages, although the quality may vary.

Disadvantages:

1. Lack of Creativity: AI lacks the nuanced understanding and creativity that humans bring to content creation. It may struggle with generating imaginative, emotional, or highly nuanced pieces.
2. Context Understanding: AI may not fully grasp the context, cultural nuances, or specific requirements of certain industries, resulting in inaccuracies or inappropriate content.
3. Quality Variation: The quality of AI-generated content can vary widely depending on the specific model and the training data it has been exposed to.
4. Ethical Concerns: There are ethical considerations related to plagiarism and potential misuse of AI-generated content. Users should ensure that the use of AI-generated content aligns with ethical standards.

In summary, while AI can be a valuable tool for certain types of content creation, it's crucial to approach it with caution and use it judiciously. It's often best used for generating drafts or initial content that can be refined and enhanced by human writers who bring creativity, context awareness, and a deeper understanding of the target audience. Additionally, careful review and editing are essential to ensure accuracy and appropriateness.

??

(credit to my Japanese intern, Ai)