Following up on my March 14 overview blog on chatbots,  I have been looking more in depth at the various chatbots currently available. Last week I delved into Perplexity AI; today I’ll talk about my go-to helper, ChatGPT.

Granddaddy of the Chatbots

I use chatbots all the time and consider ChatGPT to be the “OG” of chatbots, having been around since early 2022. In reality, the true “granddaddy” of chatbots is ELIZA, created at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1966. (Fun fact: Back then they were called “chatterbots”.) However, I – probably like most people, I imagine – first started hearing a lot about chatbots in 2022 when ChatGPT came onto the scene. There is a free version, but I use the $20 per month subscription on my desktop and IPhone.

Proofreading Plus

My main application for ChatGPT is for proofreading.  It does a great job on grammar, spelling, and sentence construction.

Summarizing

I also use it to summarize chapters in our reports. One thing I’ve discovered is that this has to be done on a chapter-by-chapter basis. Submitting the entire report yields a very different result!

Executive Summary

From my chapter-by-chapter summaries, I then have the basis for putting together an Executive Summary or Introduction to my report.

Content Driven Searches

I didn’t find that ChatGPT produced a very satisfying answer to content-based questions like what are the ten best NY Broadway plays? It seemed to rely on a specific web-based review. So, in that regard it seemed pretty static.

Writing a Blog Post

I wasn’t particularly impressed with its content creation skill. This may have to do with the nature of the content that I requested, which was to write a blog post on the advantages of ChatGPT. It just spat back content from the web. It did better when I asked it to write a post on the Zulu uprising in the 19th century, but I found the composition to be rather mundane.

Image Creation

I asked it to draw a chicken. I rather liked it.  But like many of the AI generated images it had the look and feel of, well, “AI generated images”.

From ChatGPT: “Here’s the picture of a chicken in a natural setting that you requested. Let me know if there’s anything else you’d like to add or change!”

What’s to Like?

• While not lightning fast, it has quite acceptable speed delivering results.
• The user interface is easy to use.
• iPhone versions work well.
• Lots of folks are familiar with it.
• Image creation seemed rather nice, and it followed directions well.
• It is good at summarizing, particularly if it is fed text in smaller chunks.

What’s not to like?

• The version that provides the most features costs $20 per month.
• I didn’t care for its original writing.
• It has this annoying feature of drawing boxes around headings, or the first words in lists. It takes a long time to get these out of the Word file.

Overall Grade

In summary, I’d give ChatGPT a “B”.  Check back for my future reviews of other AI chatbots!