Mark and I have been using AI tools like ChatGPT, Bard and Midjourney more and more to help us in both our work and personal lives. In our day jobs we create training content for people in the tech industry and AI is a big focus.

Things are changing so quickly that we’re less concerned about trying to keep up with all the new AI tools and companies, and more interested in getting good at asking questions and defining problems that AI tools can help us solve.

For example, one of the challenges we’ve repeatedly come up against as we’ve been learning about syntropic forest systems and permaculture is that so much of the advice is not specific to Aotearoa New Zealand. Or if it is, it’s broad for the whole country, which means we need to cross-check what would work in our sub-tropical oceanic climate.

Mark started using ChatGPT to do some of the heavy lifting when it comes to researching what to catalogue:

• what plants we should have

• what strata layer they’ll be part of

• how fast they’ll grow

• any benefits like nitrogen fixing

He has been an early adopter of ChatGPT and has a few simple tips to get significantly better answers.

Conversations not commands

Rather than issue commands to ChatGPT, write your prompts like you are having a conversation. Give context, explain what you’re trying to do, ask questions. You can even include in your prompt an instruction for ChatGPT to ask clarifying questions of you before it begins researching the answer.

Give custom instructions

ChatGPT has a section called “Custom Instructions” where you can provide answers to these two questions:

What would you like ChatGPT to know about you to provide better responses?

How would you like ChatGPT to respond?

ChatGPT will then use that personal context to respond to any prompts you send. This has significantly reduced the number of hallucinations (strange responses) that I’ve experienced.

Use it every day

Set yourself a goal. If you’ve never used ChatGPT (or another AI tool) before, start with a goal of at least one prompt per day. If you’re already experimenting a bit, make it 5 prompts per day. This experimentation will help you build a mindset around AI that will allow you to evolve how you use it as it improves.

How have you been using AI tools to help you every day?