Useful applications of ChatGPT in knowledge work

14 March 2023. Useful applications of ChatGPT in knowledge work

Johannes Schunter showed a number of useful applications in development work ; what the bot is good at and what it is not good at. He is Head of Knowledge Management · Evangelisches Werk für Diakonie und Entwicklung e.V., Berlin, Germany.

Organised by Knowledge Management for Development (KM4Dev) is a global community of practice of primarily international development practitioners interested in knowledge management and knowledge sharing theory, practice and related matters.

In November 2022, ChatGPT is released for free, achatbotbased on GPT-3.5(trained on 100 billion words). Within 2 months, it gains 100 million users (TikToktook 9 months ; Instagram took 28 months). Microsoft follows with Bing Chat (based on GPT), and Google, Meta, and Amazonare about to release their own language models. 

ChatGPT is suitable for standard communications: Protocols, pressreleases, job advertisements, announcements, event invites, questionnaires, bureaucratic communication, etc.

Use of ChatGPT in office tasks leads to: 37%increasedproductivity, increased job satisfaction (related to the task), increased self-efficacy (Experimental Evidence on the Productivity Effects ofGenerative Artificial Intelligence, March 2023)

Open AI just announced 14/03 it is launching its long anticipated GPT-4 model, which according to them comes "with advanced reasoning capabilities". (see video at the bottom)

What does this mean for everyday knowledge work?

Useful for:

1. First drafts of content (communication, FAQs, briefing notes, proposals, press releases, grant applications)
2. Summary of texts (protocols, publications, transcripts)
3. Translation“of complex texts (bureaucratic, legal, medical, scientific) in to easy language
4. Generation of ideas (names, applications, slogans, interviews)
5. As lectorate (grammar, stile, tone, voice, target audience)
6. As remedy for writer‘s block
7. For planning and analysis (schedules, analysis)
8. As tutor and training partner

What does this mean @ institutional / organisational level?

1. Every organisation will maintain its own internal AI system which knows all its internal content and can: a) Answer any questions innatural language regarding anything that was ever documented in written form (and visible for everyone in the organisation) ; b) Create new content in any format based on this 
2. Currently still too expensive
3. Hallucination problem is not solved yet
4. Development organisations must ready themselves to make an investment in this area in the next 2-3 years

Prepare for the future:

• Educate colleagues in your organisations about the potential and practical applications of retail AI tools
• Plan for building a Q&A machine for your own organisational content by

• Identifying the best use cases in your organisation
• Prepare the data
• Test tools and scenarios via prototypes
• Plan financial investment
  
  
• Discuss and prepare your organisation strategically for the coming wave of societal change

A lot of education today is about answering questions. But for the future—with AI in the picture—what’s likely to be more important is to learn how to ask questions, and how to figure out what questions are worth asking. Or, in effect, how to lay out an “intellectual strategy” for what to do. And to be successful at this, what’s going to be important is breadth of knowledge—and clarity of thinking. See: Will AI take our jobs?

The recording will also be available on the KM4Dev YouTube channel?

Shared resources:

What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?

That ChatGPT can automatically generate something that reads even superficially like human-written text is remarkable, and unexpected. But how does it do it? And why does it work? My purpose here is to give a rough outline of what’s going on inside ChatGPT—and then to explore why it is that it can do so well in producing what we might consider to be meaningful text. I should say at the outset that I’m going to focus on the big picture of what’s going on—and while I’ll mention some engineering details, I won’t get deeply into them.

DALL·E 2 - DALL·E 2 is an AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language.