What Is ChatGPT and How Can You Use It?

If you’ve been following the news for the past month or so, you’ve probably heard a bit about ChatGPT and the many ways it’s being implemented. So, what does chat GPT stand for? What is this phenomenon? What is an AI?

ChatGPT means “chat generative pre-trained transformer,” and at first glance, it seems to just be another chat bot. Chatbots have been around for a while now and are designed so you can have simple chat conversations with a robot. Chatbots like ELIZA were developed as far back as 1966, according to a Wikipedia entry, and appear similar to text messages on your phone. You type in statements or questions and the chatbot will give what it determines to be an appropriate response. With chatbots, you can conduct rudimentary text-based conversations. That said, it would quickly be very clear that you’re not talking to a real person.

A chatbot is a form of artificial intelligence, which is a machine created by humans designed to perceive, understand, and react to information that it receives in a lifelike way. While having a lifelike conversation with artificial intelligence is evolving, ChatGPT is able to answer questions, give advice, and even write things for you.

ChatGPT was designed by OpenAI, a company dedicated to researching and developing artificial intelligence. OpenAI has developed several other artificial intelligence programs, such as DALL·E 2, which generates pictures based on user input. Their intelligence tools are designed to understand user input (what you type into the bot) and then give the most accurate and appropriate responses.

The buzz about ChatGPT is that it can actually give advice on useful questions that you may have. Traditionally, when you have a question like “what is the best chocolate chip cookie recipe,” you’d probably Google it and look through the different recipes presented to you. If you ask this same question to ChatGPT, it will do all that work and present you with what it finds to be a good recipe.

Best Ways to Use AI Chat Bots

ChatGPT has a lot of excitement surrounding it that generally relates to AI and its many potential uses. Microsoft has announced it will be upgrading its search engine Bing with a faster and more human-like version of an AI similar to ChatGPT. It’s even begun to be implemented in the workplace, as ChatGPT can write code, copywrite, and even provide basic customer support.

ChatGPT can also be useful for you when you need simple things written. It’s excellent at simple emails, questions you may have, and other less important text-based tasks that you may have hit a wall on writing. Some users have even begun to use ChatGPT for writing cover letters and other professional-adjacent tasks. While this is certainly a potential use for the AI, especially as it continues to be developed, using the AI still requires some amount of editing and reviewing.

Downsides of AI Chat Bots

On their website, OpenAI discloses that ChatGPT is still in “training.” In other words, it’s still learning how to give accurate and helpful responses. ChatGPT will sometimes provide answers that, at first, sound reasonable and well-structured but may in fact be incorrect or nonsensical. The bot may also reuse certain phrases or words, resulting in a strange uncanny answer. You will always need to review what ChatGPT wrote to ensure it’s coherent and correct.

As an example, when we asked ChatGPT to explain the money rules of 72, 114, and 144, it didn’t quite get the answer right. The 114 investor formula is how long money will take to triple itself, which is roughly 114 months; or time of investment to triple = 114/percentage rate of return (or interest rate).

When asking this question to ChatGPT, it incorrectly states that the rule of 114 is how long it will take for the money to double. In fact, it said that all 3 “rules of money” are the amount of time it takes to double your money.

This seems like a simple enough fix, right? Just replace double with triple. That said, you don’t know what you don’t know and if you’re trying to use ChatGPT to answer questions, you may end up doing something incorrectly. Harmless enough in a non-professional environment but potentially catastrophic in the workplace. So, always check your facts!

Other Free AI Tools

ChatGPT is fun enough to experiment with, but there are a lot of other AIs out there that serve different purposes. Most of them are free to use and accessible entirely through your OneLaunch browser.

Chat GPT alternatives

As AI content creation evolves, many developers are initially offering free trials of their tools, so although we’re including some of these here that we know to be free or partially free, understand that terms can change at any time!

Some of the emerging names in the Chat GPT competitive space include: Jasper, Quillbot, and YouChat.

Create AI art

We mentioned DALL·E 2 before, but this AI generates art from a description that you input. It will even consider art style and certain adjectives/verbs that you write. You can say that you want a “funny cat, cartoon style, orange,” and you’ll get something like this:

Write an AI adventure

AI dungeon takes a modern spin on one of the earliest forms of video games. We’re talking about text-based adventures where you would read what’s happening in a story similar to a book and then input what you’d like to do next in the machine. However, these adventures were scripted and had to be hand-designed by a person. AI dungeon is a randomly generated original story and will evolve based on what you do.

Create your own chatbot

Chai.ml is the evolution of early chatbots and can respond to questions and host simple conversations. They’re designed purely for talking and responding to what you say. The realness of them can be a bit unnerving.

Use With Caution

Consider checking out these browser-based AIs using OneLaunch’s Chromium-based browser. If you like one of the bots we’ve mentioned, you can bookmark it or pin the website to the OneLaunch dock for quick and easy access.

As with any online experience, never give over personal information that could be used against you or used to access your financial information or personal assets.