Countless people herald ChatGPT as a productivity boon, great for helping you land a job, produce content, create a resume, and everything else you can think of. But what about the fun, unusual, and inventive ways to put ChatGPT to use?
Here's how you can get creative with ChatGPT.
1. A Better Version of Google
Downloading the ChatGPT app is like having a compact version of the internet right in your pocket. The best part is that you no longer need to wade through advertisements and long meandering articles to answer a simple question like "Will my steel pan work on an induction stove?".
The free version of ChatGPT isn't connected to the internet but instead relies on the information it learned through training. Subscribing to ChatGPT Plus, on the other hand, allows you to hook ChatGPT up to the web and retrieve current information.
Just like the internet, however, it can still get things wrong. There are some big problems with ChatGPT that need to be fixed, so be careful not to believe everything it says and avoid using it for high-risk outcomes!
2. Kickstart a Brand New Hobby
How do I learn to play the piano? What painting materials do you need for watercolor painting? How do I bake a potato gratin? Learn something new by putting these questions to ChatGPT. It's far quicker than trawling through internet blog posts to find a simple answer to what you're looking for.
If you're new to this technology, read our guide on how to use ChatGPT by OpenAI.
3. Learn How Something Works
One area in which ChatGPT excels is helping us understand difficult ideas. You can ask it to explain the major themes in a famous novel or find the connection between two ideas. And if there are any parts of the answer you don't get, ask ChatGPT to clarify the point.
If you want to try something a bit different, ask ChatGPT to explain an idea using a funny analogy or have it write the answer in the style of a rap song.
4. Sketch a Website and ChatGPT Will Build It
Words aren't the only language ChatGPT can speak; it can also comprehend images and write code. Put these two things together, and it could build you a website based on little more than a sketch. The multi-modal capabilities that let you share an image with ChatGPT are available on ChatGPT Plus.
If you're wondering how far you can go, here's how we used ChatGPT to build a web app.
5. Write a Book
Most serious writers would laugh at the idea that anyone might use ChatGPT to help write something like a book—and rightly so. We don't truly want to read books written by an AI bot because that would miss the whole point of seeing the world through another person's view.
But ChatGPT can be used to aid the writing process in plenty of ways:
- As a thesaurus/dictionary
- Checking your grammar
- Changing the tone
- Paraphrasing
- Outlines, headings, name generation
- Talking through ideas
It just takes a little imagination to think about how ChatGPT could push you to finish that story you've been working on for ages. These things already exist in separate tools—as apps, plugins, or websites—but ChatGPT combines all these things in one location.
This is just the start. One thing we tried, for example, was feeding a book summary to ChatGPT and asking it to put the major plot points into a table alongside their descriptions. You can do this for your own writing as a way to organize your ideas. Something that could have easily taken an hour was completed in mere seconds.
6. Compose a Message
Emailing a landlord or asking a boss for time off work can be difficult, but with ChatGPT on your side, you will always know how to arrange your words professionally. ChatGPT can review your email and make suggestions for improvements or rewrite something in a different tone, e.g., professional, casual, friendly, direct.
We cover several tricky situations in our guide to using ChatGPT to write difficult work emails.
7. A Safe Space to Vent
When life gets you down, it can be helpful to talk to someone. While it's not always possible to share your thoughts with friends or family, you can vent to ChatGPT.
Treat it like writing in a journal. Use it to scribble down your feelings or perhaps more constructively to explore a problem that is causing you stress. Sometimes, all we need is to feel like someone is listening.
As always, make sure to keep things anonymous. The number one rule of protecting yourself in the era of AI is not to share sensitive information with a chatbot.
8. Style Suggestions
With everything ChatGPT has absorbed about the history of fashion, it can be a surprisingly good place to look for style advice. What works with loafers? How can I dress up a pair of jeans? What classic pieces of clothing should every woman have in the closet? You can expand your questioning to colors, textures, fabrics, accessories, and more.
9. Cooking With ChefGPT
As we've discovered, people are taking ChatGPT into the kitchen too. You can find tutorials for how to meal prep with ChatGPT and examples of people taking pictures of the food in their refrigerator and getting recipe suggestions from ChatGPT in return.
If you're on the free version of ChatGPT, you won't have the image function, so you will have to manually enter the ingredients you have on hand. That aside, there are plenty of other things you can try, too, like asking for meal ideas based on cost, calories, seasonal produce, or serving size.
10. Children's Storyteller
ChatGPT can pass as a fairly decent storyteller, one that your children might get a lot of fun from! You can use it to cast real-life people as characters in your kids' story or generate a story involving your kids' favorite toy. They'll get a kick out of hearing a bedtime story that seems unique to their lives.
11. Write Poetry
Alongside creating stories, ChatGPT can whip up a poem too. It's a great addition to a birthday card if you're wondering who writes poetry these days! You can ask it to write in the style of a famous writer or a given format like a limerick. Just give it a topic, and away it goes.
12. Brainstorm Ideas
ChatGPT is a great source of inspiration if you're ever stuck for ideas. From gift ideas to planning a party to putting together a vacation itinerary, ChatGPT can lay it out in a matter of seconds. It should be enough to get you started brainstorming and might offer you ideas you wouldn't have thought about.
13. Get Tailored Movie Suggestions
Type in a genre, a decade, your favorite actor, or any other specific detail, and ChatGPT can turn in a movie suggestion that fits the bill. No more doom-scrolling on Netflix or sifting through reviews on Rotten Tomato.
We also tried telling ChatGPT something we enjoyed watching recently and asked if it could recommend what else we should try out.
If you're curious how it landed on these recommendations, here's what ChatGPT had to say.
In this case, I inferred recommendations based on the information that "Still Game" is a Scottish sitcom and made suggestions for other shows with similar themes, humor styles, or involving some of the same actors. I aimed to provide a variety of options to cater to different preferences within the comedy genre. Keep in mind that personal preferences can vary, so it's always a good idea to check out trailers or reviews to see if a show aligns with your taste before watching.
14. Defeating Writer's Block
There are several ways that ChatGPT can help you get past writer's block, from suggesting article titles to brainstorming topics. For example, try entering what you have written so far and asking ChatGPT to list a few alternative headings.
Given a topic, it can also flesh out a few different angles that might be worth writing about. It might be enough to get your creative juices flowing and push you past your writer's block.
15. ChatGPT as a Teaching Tool
You might be surprised to hear that teachers also make the most of ChatGPT in the classroom.
One way you can use it, for example, is to produce a multi-choice questionnaire on a topic. We suggest feeding ChatGPT the relevant information, like a passage from a textbook or website, and asking it to use it as a source. As you can imagine, this method extends to all kinds of assignments.
Tedious tasks are exactly where ChatGPT can be put to good use so you can focus on more important tasks. It's these benefits of AI technology that are encouraging more people to start a career in AI.
Getting Creative With ChatGPT
Like any new technology, it will take some time to figure out its best uses. But as you can see, people are already inventing novel ways to make the most of ChatGPT. Remember that you don't want to use it for any high-risk outcome, but that aside, there are plenty of fun and creative ways to use ChatGPT.