如何充分利用ChatGPT
A few months ago, my colleagues Cade Metz and Kevin Roose explained the inner workings of A.I., including chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s Bard. Now we’re back with a new mission: to help you learn to use A.I. to its full potential.
几个月前,我的同事凯德·梅茨和凯文·罗斯解释了人工智能的内在原理,包括OpenAI的ChatGPT、微软的必应和谷歌的Bard等聊天机器人。这一次我们带来了一个新的使命:帮助你学会如何充分利用人工智能。
People from all walks of life — students, coders, artists and accountants — are experimenting with how to use A.I. tools. Employers are posting jobs seeking people who are adept at using them. Pretty soon, if not already, you’ll have the chance to use A.I. to streamline and improve your work and personal life.
各行各业的人——学生、程序员、艺术家和会计师——都在试验如何使用人工智能工具。雇主们发布招聘信息寻找善于使用它们的人。如果你还没有使用人工智能来简化和改善你的工作和个人生活的话,你将很快有机会这样做。
As The Times’s personal tech columnist, I’m here to help you figure out how to use these tools safely and responsibly to improve many parts of your life.
作为时报的个人科技专栏作家,我会帮助你了解如何安全、负责任地使用这些工具来改善你生活的许多方面。
I’m going to spend today’s newsletter talking about two general approaches that will be useful in a number of situations.
我将在今天的时事通讯中讨论两种通用做法,它们在许多情况下都很有用。
Then, in the coming weeks, I’ll give you more specific tips for different aspects of your life, including parenting and family life, work, organizing in your personal life, learning/education, creativity, and shopping.
然后,在接下来的几周里,我会针对生活的不同方面提供更具体的建议,包括育儿和家庭生活、工作、安排个人生活、学习/教育、创意和购物。
A few common-sense warnings to start:
先列出一些常识性警告:
• If you’re concerned about privacy, leave out personal details like your name and where you work. The tech companies say your data is used to train their systems, which means other people could conceivably see your information.
• 如果你担心隐私,不要输入你的姓名和工作地点等个人详细信息。科技公司说你的数据被用于训练他们的系统,这意味着其他人可能会看到你的信息。
• Don’t share confidential data. Your employer may have specific guidelines or restrictions, but in general, entering trade secrets or sensitive information is a very bad idea.
• 不要共享机密数据。你的雇主对于使用人工智能可能制定了具体指南或限制,但一般来说,输入商业秘密或敏感信息是一个非常糟糕的主意。
• Hallucinations: Chatbots are powered by a technology called a large language model, or L.L.M., which gets its abilities by analyzing enormous amounts of digital text culled from the internet. Plenty of stuff on the web is wrong, and chatbots may repeat those untruths. Sometimes, while trying to predict patterns from their vast training data, they can make things up.
• 幻觉:聊天机器人以一种称为大型语言模型(LLM)的技术为基础,该技术通过分析从互联网上挑选的大量数字文本来获得能力。网络上的很多信息都是错误的,聊天机器人可能会重复这些错误信息。它们努力从庞大的训练数据中预测规律,但有时,它们可能会胡编乱造。
The golden prompts
黄金提示
ChatGPT, Bing and Bard are among the most popular A.I. chatbots. (To use ChatGPT, you’ll need to create an OpenAI account, and it requires a subscription for its most advanced version. Bing requires you to use Microsoft’s Edge web browser. Bard requires a Google account.)
ChatGPT、必应和Bard是最流行的人工智能聊天机器人。(使用ChatGPT需要创建一个OpenAI帐户,要使用最高级的版本需要订阅。使用必应需要微软的Edge网络浏览器。使用Bard需要一个Google帐户。)
Though they look simple to use — you type something in a box and get answers! — asking questions in the wrong way will produce generic, unhelpful and, sometimes, downright incorrect answers.
尽管它们看起来简单易用——在框中输入内容就能获得答案!——以错误的方式提问会产生笼统的、无用的,有时甚至是完全错误的回答。
It turns out there’s an art to typing in the precise words and framing to generate the most helpful answers. I call these the golden prompts.
事实证明,输入准确的用词和表达以生成最有用的答案是一门学问。我称这些为黄金提示。
The people who are getting the most out of the chatbots have been using variants of these strategies:
那些充分利用聊天机器人的人一直在使用以下策略:
“Act as if.” Beginning your prompt with these magic words will instruct the bot to emulate an expert. For example, typing “Act as if you are a tutor for the SATs” or “Act as if you are a personal trainer” will guide the bots to model themselves around people in those professions.
“假装你是。”用这几个神奇的字作为提示的开头将指示机器人模仿专家。例如,输入“假装你是SAT的辅导师”或“假装你是私人教练”将引导机器人围绕这些职业的人建模。
These prompts provide additional context for the A.I. to generate its response. The A.I. doesn’t actually understand what it means to be a tutor or a personal trainer. Instead, the prompt is helping the A.I. to draw on specific statistical patterns in its training data.
这些提示为人工智能生成回应提供了额外的背景信息。人工智能实际上并不理解成为辅导师或私人教练意味着什么。但这样的提示是在帮助人工智能在其训练数据中调用特定的统计模式。
A weak prompt with no guidance will generate less helpful results. If all you type is “What should I eat this week?” the chatbot will come up with a generic list of meals for a balanced diet, such as turkey stir fry with a side of colorful veggies for dinner (which, to me, sounds very “meh”).
缺乏引导的弱提示返回的结果不太有帮助。如果你只是输入“这周我应该吃什么?”聊天机器人会列出一份泛泛的均衡膳食清单,例如晚餐吃炒火鸡,配五颜六色的蔬菜(对我来说,这听起来很鸡肋)。
“Tell me what else you need to do this.” To get results that are more personalized — for example, health advice for your specific body type or medical conditions — invite the bot to request more information.
“告诉我你还需要什么信息。”要获得更加个性化的结果——例如,针对你的具体体型或身体状况的健康建议——你可以邀请机器人来问你更多信息。
In the personal trainer example, a prompt could be: “Act as if you are my personal trainer. Create a weekly workout regimen and meal plan for me. Tell me what else you need to do this.” The bot might then ask you for your age, height, weight, dietary restrictions and health goals to tailor a weeklong meal plan and fitness routine for you.
在私人教练的例子中,提示可以是:“假装你是我的私人教练。为我制定每周锻炼方案和膳食计划。告诉我你还需要什么信息。”然后,机器人可能会询问你的年龄、身高、体重、忌口和健康目标,为你量身定制为期一周的膳食计划和健身计划。
If you don’t get good answers on your first try, don’t give up right away. Better yet, in the words of Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, treat the bot as if it were a human intern: “When it makes a mistake, point that out and ask for it to do better.” Be forgiving and patient, and you’re likely to get better results.
如果你在第一次尝试时没有得到好的回答,不要马上放弃。更好的做法是——用宾夕法尼亚大学沃顿商学院教授伊桑·莫里克的话说——对待机器人就像对待一个人类实习生那样:“当它犯错时,指出错误并要求它做得更好。”对它宽容有耐心,你可能会得到更好的结果。
Thread your chatbot conversations
保持你与聊天机器人的对话线程
After you get the hang of prompts, you can make your chatbot more helpful over time. The key here is to avoid treating your chatbot as a web search and starting with a fresh query each time. Instead, keep several threads of conversations open and add to them over time.
在对输入提示游刃有余之后,你可以让你的聊天机器人随着时间的推移变得更有帮助。这里的关键是避免将你的聊天机器人当成网络搜索,并且每次都从一个新的指示开始。相反,保留多个对话线程开放,并随着时间的推移在这些线程上增加对话。
This strategy is easiest with ChatGPT. Bing requires you to reset your conversations periodically, and Bard does not make it as easy to hop between conversation threads.
这种策略在用ChatGPT时是最简单的。必应要求你定期重置你的对话,而在Bard里,在对话线程之间跳转没有那么容易。
Natalie Choprasert, an entrepreneur in Sydney, Australia, who advises companies on how to use A.I., uses ChatGPT as a business coach and an executive assistant. She keeps separate conversations running side by side for each of these roles.
澳大利亚悉尼企业家娜塔莉·乔帕塞特就如何使用人工智能为公司提供咨询,她将ChatGPT当作商业教练和行政助理。对于每一个角色,她都有单独的一个对话。
For the business coach thread, she shares insights about her professional background and the company’s goals and problems. For the executive assistant thread, she shares scheduling information, like the clients she’s meeting with.
在商业教练对话线程上,她分享了有关她的专业背景、公司的目标和问题的见解。在行政助理对话线程上,她分享日程安排信息,比如她要会见的客户。
“It builds up and trains properly, so when I ask it a question later on, it will be in the right context and it will give me answers close to what I’m looking for,” Choprasert said.
乔帕塞特说:“它会妥善地积累并训练,所以当我稍后问它一个问题时,它会在正确的上下文中给出接近我正在寻找的答案。”
She shared a bonus golden prompt that has trained her assistants to be extra helpful: Apply a framework. She recently read “Clockwork,” a book about setting up a business. When she asked ChatGPT-the-business-coach to offer advice using the framework of “Clockwork,” she was delighted to see that it could incorporate principles from the book into an action plan for expanding her company.
她额外分享了一个黄金提示,并已经利用它将她的助手训练得更加有帮助:使用框架。她最近读了一本关于创业的书《发条》。当她要求作为商业教练的ChatGPT使用《发条》里的框架提供建议时,她开心地看到它可以将书中的原理整合到她扩展公司的行动计划中。