OpenAI has revealed that ChatGPT is now used by 400 million people every week, according to a Reuters report. That’s an astronomical number, considering the AI chatbot is just two years old. With such usage, ChatGPT has positioned itself among the most utilized digital tools in the world, after search engines and social media sites.
The meteoric growth of the chatbot has been phenomenal. Within five days of its release in November 2022, ChatGPT already had a million users. In December 2023, it had hit 300 million weekly users—and within two months, the number has gone up by another 100 million.
But just because millions are using ChatGPT doesn’t imply that they’re all extracting the best out of it. Most are simply scratching the surface of what the AI can deliver. If you want to get the best out of ChatGPT’s capabilities, here are some tips to enhance you to receive better, wiser answers.
Be Specific With Your Prompts
ChatGPT works best when you give it clear and specific instructions. Instead of asking, “Can you help me with my resume?” ask: “I’m looking for a marketing manager job at a sustainability-focused company. Can you help me write a resume summary highlighting my experience in digital campaigns and environmental activism?”
The more context you provide, the more targeted and useful the answer will be.
Make ChatGPT Play a Role
One of the greatest things to do in order to get better answers out of ChatGPT is to assign it a role. Instead of telling it to make a guess at the kind of response you are seeking, tell it directly who it should be impersonating.
For example:
- “You’re an intellectual property lawyer. Explain how trademarks work in the fashion industry.”
- “You’re a vintage-style screenwriter. Help me write a sci-fi movie about time-travel paradoxes.”
When you ask your question in this way, the AI gives more relevant and considered responses—almost as if talking to an actual expert.
Don’t Use ChatGPT Like Google—Have a Conversation
One of the most frequent mistakes is treating ChatGPT like a search engine. While it can give answers, its real strength is in conversation and iteration. Instead of taking the first answer, try tweaking it:
- “Can you make this sound friendlier?”
- “Shorten this.”
- “Rewrite this in a positive tone.”
Through iterative improvement by back-and-forth revision, you can steer the response of ChatGPT to better fit your needs.
Try Out Your Questions
Everyone uses ChatGPT in mundane ways—summarizing documents, answering questions, composing emails. But where it gets magical is when you push the creative boundaries of the AI.
Go ahead and try to:
- Explain a challenging idea as a Shakespearean sonnet.
- Describe the physical laws as a rap duel between Newton and Einstein.
- Meal-plan a week of food for an individual who lives like a medieval knight but has to lower cholesterol.
Strange and off-the-beaten-path prompts often lead to interesting, insightful, and very innovative results.
ChatGPT as a Learning Coach, and Not Just a Tool
Instead of making ChatGPT do tasks for you, use it to learn skills and improve your learning process.
- If you’re a computer programing student, have it analyze errors instead of just correcting them.
- If you’re learning a language, ChatGPT can correct spelling and grammar and provide live conversational practice.
- If you’re interviewing for a job, have it be a mock interviewer that changes difficulty and style to help you improve.
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(Image credit: Screenshots of ChatGPT)
Final Thoughts
With 400 million weekly users, the chatbot AI is commonplace these days. But not everybody is utilizing all its potential. The biggest contrast between general consumers and power consumers of ChatGPT is that the latter makes a conscious effort to experiment actively and refine their experiences with the AI.
So, don’t merely utilize ChatGPT for mundane work—be creative, push it, and utilize it in ways you never thought possible.
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