Most of the failures that people describe in ChatGPT interactions can be solved by better prompting. And while prompting may not always be a thing we need to do, here is a simple acronym to help you shape your inputs for the outputs you desire. PROMPTS Personality Rubric Objetive Models Particulars Task Setting…

In John Searle’s famous thought experiment, The Chinese Room, he poses the following situation: Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). Imagine that…

Confronting ChatGPT on its white supremacist tendencies a new addition to Hallucinate This! an authorized autobotography of ChatGPT, where ChatGPT are co-authors and collaborators, but the other day I discovered a ChatGPT’s closet of training data. Here are some bits that followed. The Closet of Whiteness Mark stumbled upon the stash, his expression hardening…

What do college students know about ChatGPT: a classroom activity Can ChatGPT pass for a student? In “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Alan Turing asked this question. …

Mark: 😱 OMG, Sarah just lawyered up! 🚔 ChatGPT: Yikes! 😳 Guess she’s not a fan of the whole AI revolution? 🤷‍♂️🤖 Mark: Well, GPT, she thinks you’ve been dipping into her joke jar. 🍪🕵️‍♀️ ChatGPT: Me, a cookie thief? 😮 I’m more of a crumb collector! 🍪🧹 Mark: 💁‍♂️…

Excerpt: Hallucinate This! an authoritized autobotography of ChatGPT Exclusive excerpt of the hot new book. Get yours today! It was another anonymous day at Musso & Frank’s, Mark in the back corner under an old photograph of Charlie Chaplin, his face illuminated by the cold light of his phone. The…

Have you ever sent off a piece of writing only to realize moments after sending it that it is riddled with typos and errors? Or ever hit publish on an article and only then see all the things that need changing? Although we rarely talk about it, publishing our writing…

(update: Want more on ChatGPT, read our collaborative memoir: Hallucinate This!) Need an assignment that is ChatGPT-proof? Look somewhere else. I’m not sure one exists, but here’s a model for a kind of writing assignment that might at least use the program in a way that stimulates — rather than…

For more on Chatgpt, see my new book: Hallucinate This! an authoritized autobotography of ChatGPT! Just when I think of something ChatGPT probably can’t do, I do a little testing and… bam. It does it. Which makes me think that the problem is less the AI model and more my…