How to use AI to do practical stuff: A new guide

A guide to the useful things one can do with LLMs.

To write stuff: nothing comes "even close to GPT-4... access at Bing for free or ... subscription to ChatGPT... GPT-3.5 also good and much faster". Some tips:

• "Getting good writing out of ChatGPT takes some practice"
• Paste in your text and ask ChatGPT to improve it, suggest "how to make it better for a particular audience... to create 10 drafts in radically different styles... make things more vivid, or add examples"
• watch out for hallucinations: see "guide to avoiding hallucinations. "
• Don't ask it to explain itself: "it will give you a plausible answer that is completely made up. It is not interrogating its own actions"

Make images: Midjourney is best: "lowest learning-curve ...just type in "thing-you-want-to-see --v 5"" (v5 specifies the latest model). Stable Diffusion is the open-source option (Bing (Image creator) requires signup).

There are biases: "use this explorer to see these biases at work", and they're "trained on existing art ... not transparent and potentially legally and ethically questionable."

Create ideas: To have good ideas you need a lot of ideas, so AI is perfect: "Will all these ideas be good or even sane? Of course not. But they can spark further thinking on your part". ChatGPT's the best option. Here is a guide.

Make videos: "It is now trivial to generate a video with a completely AI generated character... reading a AI-written script, talking in an AI-made voice, animated by AI". Deeo fake heaven. Use D-iD for animation, ElevenLabs for voice cloning.

Code: "GPT-3.5 is a powerful coding companion. But GPT-4 is next-level."

Self-learn: Use "as a jumping-off point for your own research, not as the final authority on anything."

• Ask "Summarise this for me", and then ask followups. Check against reality.
• Ask it to explain concepts. Check against reality. If right, then "ask it to explain it in different ways “Like I am 10” or “in a script from The Office” or “in the context of a medical examination.”"