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ChatGPT – A new colleague for IT consultants

During the spring of 2023, the ChatGPT name has been on everyone’s lips. The chat bot, which has become the world’s most viral app, could also become your best work friend in the future. But what is ChatGPT and how can IT consultants use it in their work?

What is ChatGPT?

The hottest innovation for the rest of 2022, ChatGPT, is an artificial intelligence tool developed by the American OpenAI research centre. ‘GPT’ stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. The application is essentially a language model that has been fine-tuned using machine learning.

ChatGPT’s mission is to mimic a human-like chat partner and answer the questions posed to it. It can produce intelligent text on the requested topic, create and debug it-software, and even write poetry and song lyrics. The application also remembers past conversations and understands context.

ChatGPT works mainly in English, but also understands and can mimic other languages. The grammar of the Finnish language is still a challenge for the bot and the validity of its claims is not entirely watertight.

What can an IT consultant use ChatGPT for?

As an IT consultant, you can use ChatGPT to:

  • Search for information: find information on different technologies, tools or industry trends.

  • Problem solving: the ChatGPT gets to the heart of your issue and helps you solve it by providing a range of options.

  • Training: you can use the app’s knowledge base to teach yourself, your employees or your customers.

  • In strategy development: the ChatGPT offers suggestions for developments such as software development and explains how the latest industry changes will affect your work.

At its best, AI can provide significant support to help you work more efficiently or improve your business, but it is not yet a substitute for a human brain.

 

We asked ChatGPT how an IT consultant can use it in their work..

Talk to AI effectively

You also need to be able to communicate effectively with your colleagues, and the same goes for AI. In a short time, writing good prompts has become an art form in itself, and has been written about in guides and which and paid for their skills..

When formulating a prompt, you need to be able to highlight certain key words and issues related to the topic of the conversation that you want the AI to take into account when generating the response. The prompt can also be used to instruct the AI on how to formulate the response, for example, to make it as understandable as possible.

On the other hand, prompts do not necessarily have to be as polished diamonds with ChatGPT as they do with, for example, image-generating AI applications. After all, it is a conversational AI that remembers the context of what has been discussed before, and previous statements can be corrected and new information can be added as needed.

Be careful with artificial intelligence

ChatGPT learns from its interactions and is constantly evolving to become a more natural conversationalist. OpenAI will continue to collect data from users of the app and use the data it collects to fine-tune the app. To learn more about ChatGPT’s data collection, read the article in GCN’s “ChatGPT is a data privacy nightmare. If you’ve ever posted online, you ought to be concerned”.

Although ChatGPT performs its tasks with surprising accuracy, its fact base is so far rather limited. The app’s database has been updated until September 2021, meaning that it is currently unable to answer questions about the present. ChatGPT is also capable of making claims that seem convincing but are not true. This is known as “hallucinating the facts”. The use of source criticism is therefore still recommended. The app has also been criticised for distributing copyrighted material.

You should also be careful with the code generated by ChatGPT. The user should go through the code themselves and understand what it does, as the generated code may contain errors or be slow, for example. (Of course, the AI can be alerted to these shortcomings and will try to produce a corrected version.) Also, due to a lack of “prompts”, the logic of the generated code may differ from what the user is trying to achieve. Even to detect such errors, a closer look at the AI output is required. The importance of programming skills is therefore not lost even if the code is produced by AI.

Finally

As an IT consultant, you can use ChatGPT to solve problems, write a text on a topic you provide, retrieve information and even for training purposes. The app works best in English so far, but the bot can also produce text in Finnish. However, be careful with grammar and facts; the text may be convincing, but source criticism is highly recommended.