Democracy Dies in Darkness

The do’s and don’ts of using ChatGPT in your daily life

Don’t expect an AI chatbot’s first response to be good. Do keep feeding it details until it improves.

By
September 5, 2023 at 12:30 p.m. EDT
The silhouette of a person with message boxes popping up around it against a yellow background.
My colleagues spent many months trying, failing and trying again to use ChatGPT to help summarize information, brainstorm and write. (Tucker Harris/The Washington Post)
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Artificial intelligence chatbots aren’t hard to use. But in my experience, and maybe yours, chatbots are hard to use well.

Effectively using ChatGPT, Bing AI or Google’s Bard is like learning a language with unintuitive quirks.