It's fair to say Open AI has truly let the cat out of the bag when it comes to artificial intelligence and, more specifically, large language models. While these things certainly existed before, every company and its mom chose to use the word AI about 100 times per quarterly statement; it has only been recently that it has been unleashed to the masses for them to use for a vast range of projects ranging from implementing them as chatbots to answer customer queries, to helping both casual and professional coders to maximize their output and massively increase efficiency in the process. However, just like any form of technology, it's not the power it holds but how you use it that can make the difference. This article will explore GPTs and how you can maximize their potential for almost any use case imaginable.

What Is GPT?

Before we can get really into the nitty-gritty, it pays to take a brief look at what a GPT is in the context of this post. GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer (a name worthy of acronymization if there ever was one!) and is an artificial intelligence model geared primarily toward understanding and creating human-like text. There have been several incarnations harking back to GPT-1, which was invented by Google as part of the transformer architecture in 2017 but was really brought to prominence by Open AI in 2018. While this first evolution of the idea was incredibly rudimentary by today's standards, it genuinely set the scene for what we know today as some of the most sophisticated and sought-after tech that currently exists. Nevertheless, even with the modern standard of Open AIs GPT-4 (and by some accounts soon to be GPT-5), Google's Gemini (nee Bard), Meta's Llama, and Antropic's Claude, which has seen massive investment from none other than tech behemoth Amazon, GPTs limitations remain for all to see. Some of these include a reliance on scarping the web to learn (as in it cannot create, only rehash), biases, and, when using it to create content, a heavy reliance on a number of keywords that can make the content sound stilted and quite peculiar to the average person. Fortunately, there are some workarounds that are able to turn pretty generic writing into content that reads well and captures the reader's attention more soundly than even some professional human writers.

How To Harness The Full Capabilities Of GPT

GPT offers a wealth of advantages…for those who take the time to learn its nuances and grasp what it takes to wrangle and mold it into something far more valuable. Now that we have covered the basics, let's delve into the prompts and get a feel for how to utilize them.

Use Specific Prompts For The Best Results

Perhaps the most effective way to harness this technology's power is through clever use of prompting. For the uninitiated, "prompting" refers to the process of giving the GPT a detailed set of instructions outlining exactly how you want it to produce a given block of text or graphic. This can be as simple as: "Write me 100 words on the origins of the Civil War" to far more intricate instructions such as: "Write me 100 words about the origins of the American Civil War, how it began, and who the major participants were. Write your answer in the style of David Attenborough and make sure it is readable to Grade 5 level". As you can imagine, the latter example will output a far more detailed set of writing geared precisely to your target audience or your personal style of writing, etc. Moreover, if you were to opt for the former example, the model wouldn't understand what civil war you are referring to and could output text relating to some random civil war it chose to discuss.

Hallucinations Are A Thing

Carrying on from the last point about the models not understanding what you want to discuss, GPTs are well-known to hallucinate and spit out false information in a manner that appears to be fact. This can lead to all kinds of issues, particularly if you want to rely on it to create accurate content that your readers want to read rather than angrily emailing you and letting you know that, in actuality, Japan wasn't involved in the US civil war! Luckily, you can avoid this issue by allowing your chosen GPT model to perform the grunt work and then editing the content for accuracy and readability.

Make Use Of Open AIs Store

In the GPT Store, users of ChatGPT may build, share, and find AI apps that are uniquely suited to their needs. In some ways, the store distributes custom prompts that have been proven to work for particular tasks, allowing you to output content based on what you may actually require. This can save an inordinate amount of time for those who just want to perform various tasks without needing any particular knowledge about getting the correct responses.

Think Of It As An Assistant, Not A Slave

It is easy to fall into the trap of believing that all GPTs exist purely to cater to the user's every whim. While it does to some degree, expecting it to say how high when you tell it to jump is the wrong way of looking at the tech. Instead, you need to treat it as a highly efficient and productive assistant who is eager to help you out, provided you offer it the correct instruction set. In other words, it isn't set and forget, and you need to put in the legwork to train it up how you want it to perform and reap the rewards down the line. This could be creating a script that enables you to connect it to the backend of your content management system to churn out content that includes highly relevant text and images, or it could be assisting you with accounting tasks in order to reduce your workload for the more mundane tasks. The idea is that the more effort you put in, the more you can profit from the outputs it generates later on.

GPTs have revolutionized the modern world so much that you can divide it into three categories: post-COVID, post-inflation, and, of course, post-AI. However, if you want to get the most out of the numerous GPTs that currently exist (or will exist), it can pay to follow the tips outlined here.