If there were an award for the most popular buzzword of 2023, ‘ChatGPT’ would be the no-contest winner. Some people talk about ChatGPT (the poster child of artificial intelligence—or AI—technology) in concerned whispers, wondering if it will replace most of the workforce as we know it. Others praise its advantages, reveling in how easy activities like writing lines of code and creating a compelling resume have become with AI’s assistance.
Love it or hate it, AI is here to stay, and it’s permeating multiple aspects of our everyday lives. While this new technology is sure to have unforeseen ramifications in the years to come, you can use artificial intelligence today to enhance your productivity and optimize your personal finances.
You don’t need to be a technical expert to put AI to work for you. Here’s a quick overview of ChatGPT, and a few ways to leverage this cutting-edge technology.
- What is ChatGPT?
- What to Use ChatGPT For
- Tips and Tricks: Best Ways to Use ChatGPT
- Can ChatGPT Help Me With My Finances?
What is ChatGPT?
If you’re a little late to the party, ChatGPT is a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence. It’s designed to answer the questions or prompts users type in with natural language that a human would use. Programmers trained the chatbot’s responses using a huge body of text that encompasses articles, blog posts, books, and websites across the internet. Think of it as a search engine on steroids.
Created by OpenAI, ChatGPT was released on November 30, 2022. Less than a week later, it had a million users. Microsoft is investing $10 billion in this technology, so it’s kind of a big deal. While ChatGPT isn’t the only AI chatbot out there (Bard, Jasper, and YouChat are examples of others), it’s certainly the most popular one at the moment.
If you want to play around with ChatGPT, you can open an account here. It’s free to use for the time being, but the creators have announced that they plan to monetize it in the future.
What to Use ChatGPT For
The uses of ChatGPT range from fun (tell me a joke about lions) to functional (remind me to take my medication at 8 p.m.). Here are a few practical ways you can use artificial intelligence in your daily life:
- Have ChatGPT write your resume or cover letter. It may be hard for humans to toot their own horns or showcase their accomplishments, but it’s no problem for a bot. Paste the text of the job post into the chat window to tailor your cover letter to the verbiage used in the post.
- Translate text to other languages. Move over, Google Translate. ChatGPT was trained by an internet corpus of not only English text but many other languages as well. The chatbot knows Spanish, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Korean, and more.
- Settle on what to make for dinner. ChatGPT can plan your next meal according to whatever dietary parameters you want. It gives you ingredients as well as instructions, so you can save the time spent scrolling through Pinterest or trying to find the recipe buried in the food blog post for enjoying your meal.
- Design a workout routine. Plug in your height, weight, age, and fitness goals, and ChatGPT will design a workout routine for you.
- Play games or tell jokes. The chatbot will play 20 questions with you or tell you jokes. Be warned, however, that ChatGPT has dad-joke-level humor.
- Summarize an article. Copy an article link or full text into ChatGPT and it will outline the main points.
- Brainstorm.
Tips and Tricks: Best Ways to Use ChatGPT
While it has incredible potential, ChatGPT has several limitations. Use these tricks to get the chatbot to give you the most accurate answers to your questions.
- Like a search engine, how you phrase your query will determine how accurate the results are. If your reply wasn’t what you needed or expected, try rephrasing your question or ask the AI to regenerate the response.
- ChatGPT’s reliable knowledge is limited to events that happened before September 2021. Anything more recent than this date will not be accurate.
- Be specific in your query. Remember, you’re talking with a robot, so it won’t yawn or complain if you copy long strings of code or thousands of words as part of your question. The more context you can give it, the better your response will be.
- Ask follow-up questions. This is one major advantage chatbots have over internet searches. If you need more information along the same vein as your previous inquiry, just ask.
Keep in mind that the answers you get from ChatGPT aren’t perfect. You can’t believe everything you read on the internet, which is the input for ChatGPT’s knowledge base. So if you use AI for something crucial, be sure to fact-check the info before making important decisions.
Can ChatGPT Help Me With My Finances?
The publicly available version of ChatGPT cannot pick stocks or balance your checkbook for you, but you can ask the chatbot about financial concepts or best practices. It will make suggestions on saving money, investment principles, and building wealth, but it cannot assess your individual financial situation.
While financial professionals are continually finding new uses for artificial intelligence, ChatGPT isn’t in tune with emotionally charged elements of your finances like estate planning and risk tolerance.
At Legacy Planning, we provide you with a customized financial plan catered to your needs and life goals. We cover the technical elements (like choosing investments and helping you set up accounts) as well as personal considerations (which charities you want to give to and business succession planning.
To see if we can help you map out your financial plan, click here to schedule a conversation today.
Content in this material is for general information only and is not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual.
