AINoon Tutorial 1

The goal of this tutorial is to:

• Get you using a chatbot for common business use cases
• Identify important issues you should keep in mind while using GenAI
• Provide some tips for effective prompting

Data Security and Privacy

Before we begin, it is very important to remember:

• Public chatbots may use data you upload
• You shouldn’t upload any data to an AI service without company approval, especially:
  • Internal company data
  • Customer data
• Check with your IT department for approved AI services and what data is appropriate to upload to them

Open a new chat

• Open chatgpt.com or a similar tool
• We’ll start working in a new chat

Brainstorming and Drafting

Let’s start by using the chatbot for some brainstorming for kicking off a new project at work.

Type in the following request - what’s referred to as a prompt:

Write an agenda for a project planning meeting

• AUDIENCE QUESTION: Have a quick skim, any feedback on the response?

Some observations:

• It might provide suggestions for follow-up prompts at the end of the response.

• It’s quite verbose, but we can ask to make it shorter:

  Make it shorter

  • It “remembers” the history of the chat, so we don’t need to provide the original prompt again.

• It’s quite generic, it would help to be more specific about our project:

  Make it specific to a project to launch a new website

Chatbots can be a great source of inspiration when brainstorming:

• They can draw from ideas in a massive amount of text scraped from the internet and other sources.
• Still need to review the content and decide whether the ideas are relevant.
• Sometimes coming up with your own ideas first helps you better think through a topic.
  • You can use a chatbot to provide a second opinion to see if there’s anything you’ve missed.

Similar to brainstorming, chatbot’s can also be a good way to make a first draft of a document:

Turn this into a meeting invite

Chatbot’s are also quite good at mixing ideas together, like applying a style of writing to a piece of text:

Say it like a pirate

Automating web searches

We can also use chatbot’s to search the web and summarise results for us.

Enable the web search option in the chat (sometimes chatbot’s will do this automatically if needed), then prompt it to find out about upcoming events you’re interested in:

What {event type e.g. tech conferences} are coming soon in {your city}?

• You can see a list of sources it used - it’s a good idea to double-check these.
• This is effectively the same thing as Google’s “AI Summary” at the top of search results.
• AUDIENCE QUESTION: Would you trust this answer to be complete?
  • Probably not, it’s only used a source or two.
  • You can use Deep research (as a homework exercise) to get it to search more thoroughly.
  • But if it’s important, you should do your own thorough review.

Note that we started discussing a new topic here in the same chat, sometimes it’s helpful to start a new chat so that:

1. You can easily revisit specific chats in the history along the sidebar.
2. You avoid the chatbot getting confused by previous messages in the chat.

Generating Images

Many chatbots now also have built-in capabilities to generate images, try asking it to draw a city skyline you know well:

Generate an image of the {city} skyline

• AUDIENCE QUESTION: How well did it do?
• Overall, usually a pretty good approximation
• But you’ll see that it will often make mistakes in the details
  • Point out a few mistakes you can see in your image

Summarising Documents

• Now let’s try using the chatbot to summarise a document.
• We can upload word docs, PDFs, and more.
• Again, it is important to not upload company data into unapproved systems
• Let’s use a spreadsheet (as a CSV file) of washing machine reviews:

1. From technoon.org/ainoon, download washing_machine_reviews.csv

   • Each row contains a (fake) review with an associated rating.
   • The file was actually generated by ChatGPT 5 with the following prompt: “Write 100 unique 3-sentence reviews for a washing machine with associated ratings out of 10 in a table”

2. Upload the file to the chat

3. Prompt it with:

   What are the common issues in these reviews?

• It’s given us some issues to investigate, but how do we know these are the most important, or that it hasn’t missed any common issues?
• If we ask twice, we might not get the same result.
• If it’s used code to analyse the data (which ChatGPT often does):
  • We might get more consistency in results
  • We can check the code to see if we trust it’s approach - but only helpful if you can read code
• In general: good for getting ideas to investigate, but not for formal reporting or decision making

What about asking it more detailed questions?

How many rows are in the file?

Should be 100

What is the mean rating?

Should be approximately 7.74

• If it doesn’t use code to generate the answer, it is likely going to be wrong because chatbots answer based on patterns in language - they’re not a calculator!
• If it generates code to answer the question, it is more likely to give a better answer, but the code should still be reviewed.

You can try force ChatGPT to not use code by saying “don’t use code to answer”. But do this in a new chat so it can’t read the previous code-based answer.

Prompting Tips

Refer to slide in the slide deck.

Conclusion

• We’ve seen how we can use a chatbot for a bunch of useful tasks:
  • Brainstorming
  • Drafting
  • Web searching
  • Generating images
  • Summarising documents
• It’s quite useful, but it isn’t perfect
  • It’s just a tool
  • It doesn’t actually “think”
  • You need to do the thinking!
  • That’s why the logo for this course is a just a hat
  • Refer to “Golden Rule” slide in the slide deck.
• Next week, we’ll learn more about how a chatbot generates responses, which will help us better understand these limitations