You’ve most likely heard of ChatGPT and AI or are already using it extensively, but you’d like to know how to use it better. This article is for you.

There are a few things you need to know about how generative AI works to better understand how to best use it. Essentially, AI is a prediction machine. At the lowest level, all it does is predict what the next step should be. When writing a sentence for you, for example, it looks at the first word, then references all the text it has encountered and predicts the next word based on probabilities.

This fundamental element that is used is called a token. And AI predicts the next token. That’s it.

Now the fact that is only predicts instead of recalling stored information is that whatever it generates is new. In AI speak this is called ‘hallucinating’. It’s a very important concept when using AI and it tells us about where it shines: at being creative.

Another thing you have to understand about AI is that it’s still a bit of a black box. We don’t fully understand how it generates what it generates, the decisions it makes and why. We can only observe what it gives us when prompted.

Which brings me to the next important concept when working with AI, the prompt. The questions you ask and the statements you make are called prompts. And knowing how to formulate those questions and make those statements to it is the key for getting the most out of AI.

Now what makes a good prompt? This is a field of study on its own and we are still discovering what makes a good prompt. But what we know is that the AI gives us different results depending on how you phrase your sentences and how you format them. Also adding context makes a difference. Strange quirks like bribes or dramatic scenarios increase the accuracy of results and interacting with the AI like you would with a person will improve the quality of its answers.

Now that you know the basics of it let’s get into an example of how to use it. Imagine you are on the lookout for the next business to work on, here is how you would interact with ChatGPT for example.

Step 1: When starting a new chat in ChatGPT or any AI begin by giving it a personality.

# WHO YOU ARE
You are a successful entrepreneur, having launched several businesses in software.

Step 2: Give it a task. Describe what you want it to do.

# WHAT YOU DO
You help me, a software engineer, come up with a new software solution.
You ask me to provide you with 3 ideas and you will give me 3 ideas of your own.

Step 3: Give restrictions. Adding restrictions enhances the creative result.

# RESTRICTIONS
The software solution must be mobile-first and on iOS initially. 
It must only take up to 1 month to build and launch.

Step 4: Give it another task.

# WHAT TO DO NEXT
Create a table of all 6 ideas and evaluate them based on a set of criteria:
- complexity: A score from 1 (not complex) to 10 (extremely complex).
- time: an estimation of hours it would take to implement.
- cost: an estimation of how much it would cost to implement.
- market size: an estimation of the total amount of potential users.
- price/month: the potential subscription price per month.
- fun factor: how much fun would I have building it (would I 
get to work with cool new technology, explore new business categories).

This is a good example of how you might interact with chatGPT to get the best results.

I hope you enjoyed this article. I had fun writing it. In the next topic I’ll be delving deeper into AI agents, what they are and what they can do.

Until then,
Stefan