How to Use ChatGPT

Opening excerpt

The caption nobody could verify

The caption was beautiful. That was the trouble.

Lena had asked for a short account of a brass instrument in the museum's new exhibition. The draft connected a maker, a date and a voyage in three polished sentences. It made the object seem inevitable: a machine built for a particular ship, carried into a particular storm, preserved by a particular family. The designer had already placed the words beside the photograph.

Then a volunteer asked where the voyage came from.

Lena opened the acquisition record. It named a donor and described a damaged dial. It did not name a ship. The old catalog card contained a pencilled date followed by a question mark. The exhibition draft had converted uncertainty into narrative, and its fluency had made the conversion difficult to notice.

This museum and its staff are fictional. The scene is an original teaching example. It is not a report that ChatGPT produced this caption. We begin here because the predicament is wider than any one product: a useful assistant can help make language persuasive before the author has established that the language is true.

ChatGPT's official feature documentation describes a range of ways to work with the product. The tools and options available to a reader can depend on the account and current product configuration. This book treats the official documentation as the place to verify changing features, rather than promising that every reader sees the same interface.

Before choosing a feature, choose the job. Are you exploring possible explanations, extracting information, drafting language, calculating a result or preparing an external action? Those activities can look similar in conversation but require different evidence.