My Early Experiments with ChatGBT

Last April 17-18 I attended the NTEN Nonprofit Technology Conference in Baltimore – see this summary blog post on my attendance and what I learned, plus my short video reaction on Facebook to this worthwhile event.  

I attended in person a number of excellent sessions plus later viewed other virtual presentation recordings.  These included a total of 5 sessions about AI which I plan to discuss further in future website blog posts.  I learned a lot about how to use Chat GBT, Google Gemini and other AI tools as practical aids to my web design consulting business with both solopreneur and small non-profit clients.

I conducted a subsequent AI  “experiment” during an early morning break of no more than an hour (with interruptions!) during a recent family vacation trip to San Diego, where we stayed at an Air B+B in the hippie Ocean Beach area, with ready access to Dog Beach . We visited there to catch the sunset, see a young Dad supervise his little girl in the sand, and watched as dogs of all shapes and sizes roamed free without a leash and cavorted all along the beach! This Beach and the relaxing vibe in San Diego was my inspiration to try ChatGBT…hence this post’s image and subtitle – which, of course, were AI generated!

Here is how I went about testing ChatGBT:

1. Spontaneity:  I was relaxing on a couch using ChatGBT on my iPhone – a good example of the handy, informal, 24×7 nature of this AI resource!

2. Questions:  in my two use cases I posed a real business question that I wanted advice on, adding context and specificity with question “prompts”.

3. Iteration:  I then refined my original question with other conditions 

4. Comparison:  upon obtaining (in seconds!) a good Chat GbT answer, I further used Google Search and other reference sites like Amazon to check or follow up on the AI result.

5. Decision:  Make a decision on how best to edit/apply the AI result. 

In subsequent posts on these “Dog Beach AI Chronicles”, I would like to share my two early ChatGbT use cases: 

1.  to get recommendation for a microphone to improve audio recordings on my PC, and 

2.  to generate a rebranded elevator pitch for my web design business.  

I will then conclude with final lessons learned and thoughts on my future expanded business use of AI as a Solopreneur.

NOTE: in my later use of ChatGBT…

• it is amazing the range of questions the app can answer: providing feedback in the form of well written text, generating customized images, and even suggestions for free music clips to accompany social media or blog posts!
• The challenge is to discipline one’s use of AI – either by immediately applying the ChatGBT answer to a draft document, blog or social media post, or by organizing various AI responses in a document form for later reference.
• It also helps to start questions on different topics as separate ChatGBT queries, thus making it easier to locate queries and replies on this app’s Library.

Your feedback or comments on these posts most welcome!