🚀 28 ChatGPT Usage Tips by AI Evolution - 花生
Preface
If you haven't watched my video on the 28 ChatGPT usage tips yet, here is the video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zEhptQjnik
The PPT used in the video is available for download here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pyN_DRDrHOg41LeXZJbWVZ5l-s6SRwAJ/view?usp=sharing
If you haven't yet subscribed to ChatGPT Plus, you can learn about a method to directly connect to ChatGPT Plus within China here: ChatGPT Membership Purchase Recommendation
Recently, the buzz around ChatGPT and AI-related news has cooled down significantly, and OpenAI's update frequency has also slowed. At this stage, I feel it's an opportune time for a comprehensive review and reflection. It's a moment for us to calm down, avoid the FOMO (fear of missing out) sentiment, refrain from chasing hot topics, and thoughtfully integrate AI into our workflows.
My experience with using ChatGPT is as follows:
When I was still working at a major internet company, as a user growth expert for a product with over 100 million monthly active users, I used ChatGPT to help analyze data, develop marketing strategies, brainstorm marketing ideas and campaign slogans. I even had it generate SMS and push notifications for user acquisition and reactivation. This process greatly enhanced my work efficiency and yielded better performance and results than before.
After leaving that major internet company, I used ChatGPT to help me write a book that I sold on Amazon. I also utilized ChatGPT to design three plugin products: an AI reading assistant to enhance reading efficiency, flomoAI to boost writing efficiency, and ChatGPT for Amazon to improve shopping efficiency. I created a website and, in my journey as a self-media creator, ChatGPT has been instrumental in assisting with data collection and research, writing articles, and scripting videos.
Although the following techniques will use ChatGPT as an example, the reality is that most mainstream large language models use similar architectures, making these techniques universally applicable. Whether you are using Claude, Wenxin Yiyan, Tongyi Qianwen, or Xunfei Spark, you can try these techniques.
As of December 2023, the best AI language model remains GPT-4. Using the best model is the most cost-effective way to save time and effort while achieving optimal results. If you want to try GPT-4 but are having trouble purchasing a ChatGPT Plus membership, you can try this platform: https://nf.video/o9jj0s
I. General Techniques
Tip 1: Have ChatGPT Play the Role of an Expert
The primary training corpus for ChatGPT comes from the internet, which gives ChatGPT access to almost all publicly available knowledge that humans have published online. Because the training process of ChatGPT involves predicting the next possible word, most of the time, ChatGPT tends to generate text that is ordinary, mediocre, and similar to the information you can find on the internet.
ChatGPT does not seek success or professionalism, as professional content is not the characteristic of most texts and is not what most people want.
However, you can always ask for success and more professional knowledge. One approach you can try in such cases is to have ChatGPT play the role of an expert. For example, when discussing marketing issues, you can ask ChatGPT to act as a marketing consultant from a Fortune 500 company with 20 years of experience.
Prompt example: You are a marketing consultant from a Fortune 500 company with 20 years of experience. I have opened an evaluation milk tea shop called "Mìxuě Ice City." Please help me think of three marketing promotion themes.
Tip 2: Tell ChatGPT your identity
Here, identity does not refer to your demographic attributes. In most cases, your age, gender, or place of birth are not crucial for ChatGPT's response generation. What matters more is your experience and cognitive level in the subject matter you are discussing with ChatGPT.
For instance, when discussing coding issues, informing ChatGPT that you are a beginner learning Python with no other coding experience will significantly influence the choice of programming language and the level of detail in the explanation.
Similarly, if you inquire about scientific knowledge in a subject you are completely unfamiliar with, telling ChatGPT that you are a primary school student will result in more beginner-friendly and easier-to-understand content.
Prompt Example: I am a beginner learning Python with no other coding experience. I want to analyze user survey data in CSV format. Please tell me which tools I should use to assist with the analysis.
Tip 3: Limit the Length of ChatGPT's Response
Under normal circumstances, the response length of ChatGPT will typically range between 100-200 characters. However, there are times when you might prefer ChatGPT to be concise and provide a direct answer; other times, you may want a more detailed analysis and explanation; or perhaps you want ChatGPT to generate an article of a specific length. In these cases, simply inform ChatGPT of your desired response length.
Occasionally, its counting ability may be weak, and the length may not be accurate, but you can always ask it to regenerate.
Prompt Example: Write an 800-word article introducing the history of superconducting materials to readers who are not from physics or materials science backgrounds.
Tip 4: Encourage ChatGPT to Think Step by Step
ChatGPT is always predicting the next word, and each time it does so, it references the prompt you provided and the content it has already generated. Therefore, each additional word it generates is equivalent to an extra moment of thought. In situations involving logic or numerical problems, rather than having ChatGPT directly generate a result, it is often better to encourage it to think step by step.
This will expose the model's internal thought process to you, while also causing the model to spend more time on each thought step, helping you to obtain more accurate responses.
Prompt example: Think step by step and answer the following question:
There are a total of 5000 books in two village libraries, A and B. The number of books in Library A is 3x more than in Library B. After taking 150 books from Library A and placing them in Library B, Library A still has 2x more books than Library B. How many books did Library A originally have? A. 2500 B. 2750 C. 2950 D. 3500
Tip 5: Be Clear About Your Requirements and Purpose
Do not let ChatGPT guess what you want if you can state it clearly. For example, many people send an article or an error message from a website to ChatGPT, hoping that in the former case, ChatGPT can summarize the article, and in the latter, ChatGPT can tell them how to handle the error.
This approach may sometimes work, but other times it does not. It is best to be very clear about what you want ChatGPT to do or how you want it to process the material you provide. ChatGPT is not a mind reader; do not expect it to guess your thoughts.
This part will not include a Prompt example, as it is too lengthy. You can try copying any article and pasting it into ChatGPT yourself. You will notice that sometimes ChatGPT will summarize the article for you, sometimes it will help you continue writing, and at other times, it will evaluate and discuss the content of the article. The issue I want to address here is that you should always make it clear to ChatGPT what you want it to do.
Tip 6: Provide Sufficient Background Information
ByteDance internally popularizes an important management concept attributed to Zhang Yiming, which is "context, no control." This means that in communication between superiors and subordinates within the company and in cooperation matters, it is essential to provide sufficient background information rather than using power to control what an employee does, allowing them to exercise their initiative.
This perspective also applies to the use of ChatGPT. When you ask ChatGPT to assist you with a task, providing ample context about why you are doing it, the real-world background you face, or the problem at hand, allows ChatGPT to incorporate this information into its generated text, making the result more aligned with your needs.
For example, when you want ChatGPT to help you create a weight loss plan, it is best to inform it of your physical condition, your current dietary intake, and your exercise situation.
Prompt Example: I am a 30-year-old male, 175 cm tall, weighing 160 pounds. I have a preference for carbohydrates and walk 3 km daily. I want to lose 10 pounds in a month. Tell me what I should do.
Tip 7: Always Structure Your Prompt
ChatGPT prompts can be deconstructed using rules: command word + context + input content + output requirements. Not every conversation needs to rigidly follow this structure. For instance, sometimes you only need to write the command word, such as "Write an article about the Mid-Autumn Festival," and that might suffice. However, the structure you receive may not always meet your expectations.
So, when you find yourself dissatisfied with the results, instead of wanting to smash ChatGPT, consider whether something is missing from your prompt or if there is information you should have provided to ChatGPT but didn't.
By deliberately training yourself with this structure, you will quickly gain a better understanding of how to write effective prompts.
Tip 8: Systematically Design Your Custom Instructions (Custom Instruction)
In July, ChatGPT introduced the ability to customize system-level instructions. This feature allows you to specify your identity and preferred type of ChatGPT responses in the settings. Each time you start a conversation, ChatGPT will be aware of this information, saving you from many complex operations.
In other words, you can systematically inform ChatGPT about the types of conversations you might engage in, as well as the roles you want ChatGPT to play or the characteristics of the responses you expect in each type of conversation. This system-level capability is something that other API-connected shell applications cannot achieve. ChatGPT hopes that this feature will enable you to have simpler interactions with ChatGPT on mobile devices and gain an advantage in competition with shell applications. Therefore, don't forget to properly set up this function. For specific setup steps and methods, you can refer to my previous article on the homepage: Tips for Using ChatGPT's New Custom Instructions
II. Productivity Improvement Techniques
Tip 9: Let ChatGPT Help You Generate a Personalized Resume
In the process of job hunting, many people prefer to use a single resume to apply for all positions, which is actually a very poor strategy. Many job descriptions (JD) already clearly outline the type of candidates they are looking for. If you don't make good use of this information, you can't blame the recruiters for overlooking your resume. Therefore, a better strategy when job hunting is to tailor your resume according to the JD, making your relevant work experience stand out more prominently.
Of course, doing this can be a cumbersome burden for many people, but for AI, it's a piece of cake.
All you need to do is send your resume content and the job JD to ChatGPT, and let it help you reorganize the corresponding resume.
Tip 10: Let ChatGPT Help You Write Weekly Reports
I imagine almost all jobs require writing weekly reports, which is a common top-down management method in corporate hierarchies. However, writing weekly reports is also a source of pain for many people. You can simply delegate this painful task to AI.
There are many shell tools available now that can assist in writing weekly reports, but due to the varying requirements of most companies regarding the format and content structure of weekly reports, the output often falls short. I recommend a method where you can fine-tune your own weekly report robot using few-shot prompting. You can send it the content of the weekly reports you wrote in the previous weeks that you felt were well-done, and then briefly outline the work summary for this week, allowing ChatGPT to generate the report for you.
Tip 11: Have ChatGPT Provide You with Thinking Directions
In your work, you often need to express opinions on certain matters or face a difficult problem with no clear direction. Especially when the issue at hand requires some creativity, having ChatGPT brainstorm for you can provide ideas and directions.
These ideas may not be ones you ultimately adopt, but they can inspire you, significantly simplifying one of the most challenging aspects of work—starting a task.
Prompt Example: I am a user growth expert for Gaode Taxi. Recently, our competitor Didi Chuxing launched a campaign called "Guaranteed Pickup in 3 Minutes, or Ride for Free," which has greatly impacted our order volume. Help us come up with three marketing campaign themes with impact not less than Didi's to compete with them.
Tip 12: Integrate Specific Roles into Your Workflow (Product Manager Writing PRD)
In small businesses, it is common for one person to wear multiple hats. If you are an independent developer or a self-employed content creator, you need a broad range of skills but may not need to be highly specialized in all of them.
At this point, integrating ChatGPT as a role from a large enterprise's workflow into your work can be a good approach. For example, if you are a programmer and are about to start developing your own product independently, but you lack experience as a product manager, you can have ChatGPT take on the role of a product manager and help you write a PRD (Product Requirements Document). Through this process, you can more accurately identify and analyze user needs, and also think more clearly about the various modules that may be involved in your product.
Prompt Example: I want to develop a Chrome extension. The capability of this extension is that when a user opens the WeChat Reading page, it can retrieve the book and author information from the webpage and package this information into a prompt to send to OpenAI's API interface. The user can then receive a summary of the book from ChatGPT on the book's page.
Tip 13: Integrate the Work Methods of Top Enterprises into Your Workflow (Amazon's PRFAQ)
Amazon is a company particularly adept at inventing methodologies and thoroughly implementing them across the entire organization. One of its most famous practices is the prohibition of using PowerPoint presentations, allowing only written documents, and requiring them to be within six pages. They also have an important method called PRFAQ. PRFAQ (Press Release and Frequently Asked Questions) is an innovative product development and management tool pioneered by Amazon. This method requires that at the inception of a new project or product development, the team first drafts a hypothetical press release (PR), describing the main features, advantages, and target users of the project or product. Simultaneously, the team must compile a list of frequently asked questions (FAQ) to preemptively address potential queries from users and internal teams. The core philosophy of this method is "starting from customer needs," ensuring that the developed project or product meets the actual needs of the market and users.
If you are in product or operations, you can try using ChatGPT to generate a PRFAQ while a product feature or marketing campaign is still in your mind. This is equivalent to introducing external perspectives to help you assess the potential value your product can provide to users and the possible questions users might have when encountering your usage process.
Prompt Example: Baidu recently launched an AIGC product called Wenxin Yiyan, a chatbot similar to ChatGPT, which can engage in text conversations with users and generate images based on text. Assuming you are a senior PR professional with 20 years of experience, please write a PR release for this product to be published in tech and internet media, and add a FAQ (consider as many potential user questions as possible).
Tip 14: Use ChatGPT to Write Content for Platforms Like Xiaohongshu
The methods mentioned earlier are ways to use ChatGPT in regular work. However, many people now have side jobs, especially in the field of self-media. You can fully utilize ChatGPT to help you generate Xiaohongshu notes.
However, it is important to note that simply asking ChatGPT to write a popular Xiaohongshu note for you is unlikely to directly meet your requirements. It is best to deconstruct what you consider to be a good Xiaohongshu note based on your own experience and positioning, and then make the same request to ChatGPT.
Prompt example: Help me write a Xiaohongshu exploration note about a local Yunnan chain coffee shop called "Four Leaf Coffee." The characteristics of this coffee shop are its affordable prices (13-26 yuan) and the use of Yunnan-produced specialty beans. Your note should:
- Consider the interests and needs of Xiaohongshu's target audience of coffee enthusiasts, providing them with content they genuinely care about and need.
- Be concise and valuable: Provide practical information and unique perspectives, ensuring the information is accurate and not misleading, and can bring value to readers.
- Be engaging: Have an eye-catching title that sparks user interest. Vivid text descriptions that evoke emotional resonance and establish an emotional connection with readers.
- Encourage interaction and participation: Encourage user engagement, such as through asking questions or advocating for discussions.
- Show authenticity: Share genuine personal experiences and feelings to increase trustworthiness. Avoid excessive commercialization and maintain a natural, authentic tone.
- Have a certain level of creativity: Include novel content ideas or presentation techniques.
Tip 15: Let ChatGPT help you write video scripts
In addition to images and text, you can also fully integrate ChatGPT into your creative process on video platforms such as YouTube, Bilibili, or Douyin, allowing ChatGPT to write video scripts according to your requirements.
However, similarly, there is no single set of prompts for writing video scripts that can satisfy everyone's needs. ChatGPT can help you improve efficiency, but it cannot replace the thinking in your mind or the long-term accumulated experiences that are difficult to express in words.
Prompt Example: Help me write a 3-minute video script for a local Yunnan chain coffee shop called "Four Leaf Coffee." The coffee shop's features are affordable prices (13-26 yuan) and the use of locally produced Yunnan specialty beans. Your script should:
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Consider the target audience: This video is mainly aimed at coffee enthusiasts and tourists in Yunnan, focusing on authentic experiences and value-for-money consumption.
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Be concise and valuable: The script should be clear and straightforward, with accurate information, clearly showcasing the coffee shop's features and value.
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Be visually and aurally engaging: Use appropriate background music and visual elements to create a sense of resonance with "Four Leaf Coffee."
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Tell a story: Construct an engaging storyline through visits, explorations, and experiences, establishing an emotional connection with the audience.
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Authenticity and Engagement: Showcase the real process of exploring the shop, share genuine feelings, and encourage viewers to comment and share their own experiences.
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Creativity: Use innovative shooting techniques or presentation forms to make the video more attractive and enjoyable.
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Call to Action: There should be a simple call to action at the end, such as inviting viewers to subscribe, share, or experience "四叶咖".
Please note that the overall style should align with the brand positioning and culture of "四叶咖", showcasing the unique charm of Yunnan.
Tip 16: Let ChatGPT Turn Your Ideas into Products
Many people don't realize that ChatGPT allows them to do things they couldn't do before. For me, writing a book is a huge systematic project; I don't know how to code, and I never thought I could develop products.
But now, you can completely use natural language to program, turn your ideas into tangible products that others can use. Everything starts with a very simple prompt: output your idea, and let ChatGPT tell you how to do it step by step.
Prompt Example: I want to develop a Chrome extension. The capability of this extension is that when a user opens the WeChat Reading page, it can retrieve the book and author information from the webpage and package this information into a prompt to send to the OpenAI API interface. The user can then receive a summary of the book from ChatGPT on the book's page.
I have no prior coding experience, so please guide me step by step on what I should do.
III. Techniques for Improving Learning Efficiency
Tip 17: Directly Ask ChatGPT to Summarize the Content of a Book
As we mentioned earlier, ChatGPT has been pre-trained on a vast amount of corpus, including a significant proportion of high-quality materials such as "books," in addition to internet content. As long as the book was published before September 2021, there is a high probability that it has been learned by ChatGPT. You only need to directly inquire about the content knowledge of the relevant book.
This is also the basic logic behind my product "AI Reading Assistant." In fact, there is no need for a very complex system structure; it is just a matter of using prompts to elicit knowledge from ChatGPT.
Prompt Example: Help me summarize the main sections of the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow." Note that you should not fabricate information; you must use only the authentic and reliable corpus information you already have, and you can say "I don't know" for any information you are unsure of.
Tip 18: Let ChatGPT Help You with Selective Reading Based on Your Goals
Many times, you don't need to read an entire book in its entirety. A book, as a tool, is meant to fulfill a certain purpose of yours. In this case, when you have a specific goal in mind and want to read a book, you can express your purpose to ChatGPT, which will tell you which parts of the book are relevant to your goal. You can then proceed with selective reading, significantly enhancing the relevance of your reading material to your purpose.
Prompt Example: I am a strategic product manager, and recently I need to develop a product pricing strategy. Which parts of the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" should I read?
Tip 19: Use ChatGPT to Explain Concepts and Provide More Examples During Your Learning Process
ChatGPT can serve as a highly personalized assistant for you. During your reading process, if you encounter concepts or common knowledge that you don't quite understand, you can ask ChatGPT to provide explanations for them.
What's even better is that this explanation can be fully customized, demonstrating to you, through examples in the areas you care about, how relevant concepts can help you, allowing you to truly learn something through examples that you can understand and form associations with.
Prompt example: I'm not quite clear on the framing effect mentioned in Thinking, Fast and Slow. Could you give me three practical examples where this theory has been used in pricing strategy design?
Tip 20: Have ChatGPT Assess Your Learning Outcomes
Sometimes, merely finishing a book can give you the illusion of having learned and understood a lot of knowledge. There are several ways you can assess and confirm whether you truly understand a piece of knowledge. One method is to use the Feynman Technique, organizing what you've learned in your own words and explaining it to someone without the corresponding knowledge. If you can express this content well, it usually indicates that you have some genuine understanding.
Another way is to do what teachers do in school: take tests and exams to see how well you perform.
Fortunately, with AI, both of these methods can be completed very conveniently. You can explain your understanding of a concept to ChatGPT and have it assess the accuracy of your understanding. Or, more simply, you can have ChatGPT generate a few questions for you to see if you can answer them correctly.
Prompt Example: I have finished reading the representative heuristics, availability heuristic, overconfidence, and other aspects of Thinking, Fast and Slow. Please provide me with a few multiple-choice questions to verify whether my understanding of this content is accurate.
Tip 21: Organizing Notes and Writing Book Reviews
After finishing a book, there is another way to enhance your grasp of its content: collaborating with ChatGPT to complete the organization of notes or writing a book review.
In fact, you can certainly delegate the task of writing a book review entirely to ChatGPT, but this process, which lacks your own cognitive involvement, is actually of little value. It is not your own work, and you will remember nothing.
If you were to record everything entirely by yourself, the task of organizing the content would be quite laborious. Therefore, a collaborative approach with ChatGPT is possible: you can record any content you find interesting or noteworthy during your reading, interspersed with your own thoughts and understanding. After finishing the book, you can ask ChatGPT to help you organize these notes. This saves time and ensures that your mind is involved in the processing of important content throughout the process.
Prompt Example: Below are some notes I took while reading. Help me organize them into a more systematic reading summary:
Anchoring Category Anchoring in Anchoring Smart bracelets and smart speakers have both created new categories. In the early stages, when there is a lack of price references, users find it difficult to determine what the anchor product should be. However, once breakthrough prices are established, such as with the Xiaomi bracelet and Tmall Genie, which creatively become the anchor products in their respective categories, other high-priced smart bracelets and smart speakers are ruthlessly overshadowed. Unless you can create a new anchor object, for example, by significantly improving the sound quality of smart speakers to compete with products from the audio industry like Sony and BOSS, or by differentiating your smart bracelet from the Xiaomi bracelet in terms of appearance and functionality, making it clear that they do not belong to the same category.
In NPS surveys, the addition of explanatory text after the score of 5 significantly increased its selection rate, which was more than ten times higher than the number of users selecting scores 6 and 4. This is both an issue of anchoring and a problem with System 1.
Self-Control Concentrating on doing one thing requires self-control, which affects working memory.
Flow State You can concentrate on doing something without self-control, usually something you are passionate about and enjoy.
The brain consumes a lot of sugar, and self-control is a function of System 2. When exercising self-control, the brain's sugar consumption increases even more. It is difficult to complete a task requiring self-control in a low-sugar state. If sugar is ingested beforehand (by drinking cola or Red Bull), it is more likely to complete the task successfully.
In a state of scarcity, anxiety is generated, and attention resources are occupied by the scarce item, making self-control weaker at this time.
Peak-End Rule Process Neglect, Peak-End Rule: The experiencing self goes through the entire experience, but the remembering self remembers the highest point of the experience and the final point of the experience after it ends. The length of the process is not that important. In terms of travel, it is better to have shorter trips but more frequent ones.
Ice Hand Experiment: 60 seconds of 14°C cold water VS 60 seconds of 14°C cold water + 30 seconds of 15°C cold water. The experimenters did not inform the subjects of this situation, and 80% of the subjects preferred the latter.
Make the product experience as enjoyable as possible, and ensure the experience before closing the app is even better.
Internet products differ from real-world experiences in that users may discontinue use after any single experience. Therefore, after an extremely poor product experience, the peak and end values are likely to be the same, meaning the unpleasant experience could be multiplied by two. How to prevent this from happening is to make the user unable to give up, for example, by offering a repayment package with a non-refundable amount at the time of purchase.
Mitigating extreme unpleasant experiences, such as offering a repayment bonus when repayment fails.
IV. Techniques for Improving Writing Efficiency
Tip 22: Let ChatGPT Help You Reply to Emails
ChatGPT's text generation capabilities are truly impressive, and you should make the most of this ability. However, you should also be aware of ChatGPT's limitations, so you know when it's appropriate to involve ChatGPT.
Currently, ChatGPT may struggle to produce literary works that leave a lasting impression, but it excels at official document writing, such as writing a cover letter or replying to emails, which are quite straightforward.
Prompt Example: Seven days ago, I received this email. Help me write an English email reply stating that I apologize for only receiving accurate feedback from the bank today, and my Bank Branch Code is CIBKCNBJ400.
Marita Villavarayen
August 9, 2023, 19:53 (7 days ago)
Sent to me
Hello Alchain,
I hope you are doing well!
Our team is currently in the process of setting up your profile, however, they require your Bank Branch Code to progress further. It is supposed to be a 12 digit code. Could you kindly check with your bank and provide this information?
Tip 23: Use ChatGPT as an Editor to Polish Your Article
You don't necessarily need to have ChatGPT write content from scratch for you; its capabilities are more applicable in polishing and correcting scenarios. The reason for this is that with ample original text as input, making specific changes within it becomes very easy. For example, if you feel that your writing may be unclear or you are concerned about typographical errors, or if you want your content to be edited to be more literary, you can entrust all these tasks to ChatGPT.
Prompt Example: As a seasoned editor with 20 years of experience, please help polish the following article to make it more literary:
The internet was built by programmers, and that statement is only half true. Writing a program to sort products by price is not the same as creating an e-commerce platform where transactions can occur. The former is a specific function, while the latter is a complete product.
Programming skills enable a programmer to achieve a specific function, but how countless specific functions are combined, what effects they produce, and how they help solve practical problems require additional abilities.
Many programmers work in large and small companies, spending their days in cubicles, diligently facing their computers, so they call themselves "code farmers." They mean that they are farmers of the post-industrial era, planting crops in the fields, while they write code on their computers. Naturally, some code farmers, in their endless coding careers, develop a wild dream: A true man should not be bound by others all his life; we should become independent developers to seek personal freedom!
So, a programmer will at least once in their life try to become an independent developer. No company, no superiors, no colleagues, no work plans, no performance evaluations, just themselves, designing and developing an internet product on their own, and then releasing it online. They might make money, gain popularity, or nothing at all, but as a coder, their heart is free when they are an independent developer.
When first becoming an independent developer, they all face a question: What should they make? Striving for personal freedom is one thing, but using that freedom to do something specific is another. Most people say, "I want to do what I want to do," but when they actually can, they find they don't know what they truly want to do. Therefore, most independent developers initially choose products like tomato timers or accounting books. For some reason, and at some point, this has become a custom.
Tip 24: Have ChatGPT outline before writing
Before delving into this topic, we need to revisit two key characteristics of ChatGPT: Firstly, it is a tool that continuously guesses the next word, which means ChatGPT does not have an overall planning capability for its content; Secondly, ChatGPT's conversations have a contextual token limit, meaning that beyond a certain length, ChatGPT forgets what it has written, potentially leading to repetitions or contradictions in content.
Under these two constraints, writing long articles, novels, or papers becomes extremely challenging. However, one way to handle this is to have ChatGPT first generate an outline for the topic you wish to write about. You can then feed this outline back to ChatGPT as a long-term content plan, allowing it to generate content corresponding to a specific part of the outline.
When ChatGPT exceeds the token limit and forgets what it was doing, you can also feed this information back to it.
Prompt example: I want to write a sequel to "The Three-Body Problem" that is 50,000 words long. I hope to maintain the original style and theme of the novel. I want this novel to have 20 chapters. Please help me plan the plot summary for each of these 20 chapters.
Tip 25: Write in the voice of a specific author
Many times, the content generated by ChatGPT may not meet your satisfaction, but textual content is too subjective, and you often can't articulate exactly what you want. At this point, it's really not fair to blame ChatGPT for being weak as a service provider; more often, it's you, the client, who fails to clearly express your needs.
When it comes to textual content, if you can't clearly describe what you want, you should at least know who your favorite authors are and what style of works you like, right? Then let ChatGPT rewrite the content you provided in the language of that author, and you'll be in for a big surprise.
Prompt example: Rewrite the following text in Lu Xun's writing style:
The internet was built by programmers, and that statement is only half true. Writing a program to sort products by price is not the same as building an e-commerce platform where transactions can take place. The former is a specific function, while the latter is a complete product.
Programming skills allow a programmer to implement a specific function, but how countless specific functions are combined, what effects they produce, and what practical problems they help solve—those require additional capabilities.
Many programmers work in both large and small companies, spending their days in cubicles, diligently facing their computers, which has led them to give themselves a nickname: "code farmers." The term implies that they are farmers of the post-industrial era, with farmers planting crops in the fields, while they write code on their computers. Naturally, some code farmers, amidst their seemingly endless coding careers, develop a wild dream: a true man should not be bound by others for his entire life; one should strive to become an independent developer to achieve personal freedom!
Thus, programmers will at least attempt to become independent developers once in their lifetime. Without a company, superiors, colleagues, work plans, or performance evaluations, it's just themselves, designing and developing an internet product on their own, and then releasing it online. They might make money, gain popularity, or achieve nothing, but as code farmers, they experience true freedom in their hearts when they become independent developers.
When first becoming an independent developer, they all face a question: what should they create? Striving for personal freedom is one thing, but using that freedom to do something specific is another. Most people say, "I want to do what I want to do," but when they actually have the opportunity, they find they don't know what they truly want to do. Therefore, at the beginning, most independent developers tend to choose products like tomato timers or accounting books. For some reason, and without knowing when it started, this has become a custom.
Tip 26: Translate in the Voice of a Specific Author
In my concept, translation is one of the professions most easily replaced by ChatGPT. In fact, throughout the history of AI development, translation has always been under impact. A few years ago, when AI was still considered artificial idiocy, tools like Google Translate and DeepL were already performing well. This is because text sentences have grammar, and there are relatively standardized correspondences between words in different languages, making them easier to process.
However, the previous competition in translation was only about how to more accurately convey the original meaning. ChatGPT fundamentally changes the game rules; it can easily achieve faithfulness, expressiveness, and elegance through different paths. You can translate your favorite works in the language style of any author.
Prompt Example: Translate the following text in the styles of an ordinary translator, Lu Xun, Zhang Ailing, and Qian Zhongshu respectively: “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
Five: Learn from Experienced Practitioners
Tip 27: Visit bookai.top to Access Dozens of Professional Prompts
To assist you in better interacting with ChatGPT and enhancing your work and study efficiency, I have also created a website, bookai.top, with the help of ChatGPT. On this website, you can learn more tips for using ChatGPT and other AI tools. Additionally, I have prepared prompts suitable for dozens of professions, including product managers, product operators, data analysts, and engineers, to provide you with more practical inspiration.
Tip 28: Subscribe to the "ChatGPT Mastery Guide"
You can open this link from WeChat to subscribe: https://xiaobot.net/p/AIclass