What is ChatGPT good for and not good for?
Remember, you'll always need to verify the information, because ChatGPT will sometimes make things up (known as "hallucination.")
What is it good for?
Brainstorming ideas
Narrowing your topic ideas for a research paper, and keywords for searching in library databases.
Explaining information in ways that are easy to understand
Summarizing and outlining
Asking questions (be sure to fact check the results) You can ask a million questions without fear of being judged.
Translating text to different languages (not completely fluent in every language)
Helping write or debug computing code
What is it not so good for?
Library research (not yet). For now, it's best to use the catalog, databases, or even Google scholar to find scholarly articles. This may change in the future with more specialized search tools based on LLMs.
Asking for any information that would have dire consequences if it was incorrect (such as health, financial, legal advice, and so on). This is because of its tendency to sometimes make up answers, but still sound very confident.
What is prompting?
Simply, it's what you type into the chat box.
Always verify the information it gives you.
Think of ChatGPT as your personal intern. They need very specific instructions, and they need you to verify the information.
ChatGPT sometimes makes things up. That's because it's designed to write in a way that sounds like human writing. It's not designed to know facts.
Tips for writing effective prompts
Examples
Or...
I didn't like any of those topics. Please give me 10 more.
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ChatGPT | Open AI Free, built on GPT-3.5 No web search results. Trained on data only through January 2022. |
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ChatGPT Plus |
Open AI
(as of Nov. 6, 2023: all these features combined into "all tools.") A new feature for building chatbots without using code. These are called "GPTs." Enterprise edition for large businesses. Teams account for small business. |
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Microsoft Copilot | Microsoft Free, built on GPT-4 (If you use Creative mode, Balanced mode = CPT3.5) Generate images with DALL-E 3 using Bing Image Creator Includes web search results from Bing Search. Copilot Pro Plan with more features for individuals. Copilot for Microsoft 365 with more features for institutions and businesses. |
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Bard | Google Free, built on Gemini Pro (as of Dec. 6, 2023) Includes web search results from Google. |
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Claude 2 | Anthropic Free. Also available in Slack. Built on their own model. Focused on reliability and safety. No web search results. Trained on data only through December 2022. |
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Perplexity AI | Perplexity Free, built on GPT-3.5. Includes web search results. Offers "Focus" choices such as YouTube, Reddit, Semantic Scholar ,and Wolfram|Alpha. You can use it without creating an account. Pro account also available that uses GPT4 or Claude2. |
For a list of more AI tools, see AI Tools Landscape by Carlos Lizarraga-Celaya.
Some of the content on this page is used from the University of Arizona Libraries, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.