Tyler Cowen, Columnist

How Should You Talk to ChatGPT? A User’s Guide

Getting useful answers from the AI bot requires letting go of some of our human intuitions about how to communicate.

February 6, 2023 at 12:00 PM UTC

Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of economics at George Mason University and host of the Marginal Revolution blog.

It can be a good dinner-party companion.
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About 100 million people used ChatGPT in the month of January, according to one estimate, which would be the fastest-growing user base ever. Yet I often speak to people who are less than impressed with ChatGPT, citing its mistakes and banalities, and they suggest it is a passing fad.

In response, allow me to offer a short guide to using ChatGPT. It can do many things for you — organize your notes, correct your grammar, work with mathematical symbols. But I will focus on the most basic use: querying it. To use it well, you need to let go of some of your intuitions about talking to humans. ChatGPT is a bot.