Part 1 | Meeting generative AI
Chapter 2. What ChatGPT actually is
Key points
- GPT = Generative Pre-trained Transformer
- The breakthrough was making it usable by anyone, in a chat window
- Starting with "have a conversation" is entirely enough
What the letters stand for
"GPT" stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer.
Spelled out, that is a mouthful. Roughly, it means:
"an AI that has learned from an enormous amount of language, and predicts the words likely to come next"
Type
"The weather is lovely today, so"
and it will return something natural, such as
"it makes you want to go for a walk."
ChatGPT is an AI that has learned this "predict the natural continuation" behaviour from a vast body of text.
The innovation was the "Chat" part
AI itself is not new. One reason ChatGPT was a breakthrough is that
anyone could hold a conversation with it, in a chat window
Earlier AI carried an impression of needing specialist knowledge, needing programming, being hard for an ordinary person to approach. ChatGPT you use by simply talking to it. That was a large change.
You can type things like:
- "Tell me about low back pain."
- "Summarise this paper."
- "Explain this for a patient."
- "Suggest a structure for study-group slides."
Just as you would speak.
It is fine to just type something
There is no need to overthink the beginning. Type something. That alone is fine.
For example:
- I'm tired today
- Something's bothering me
- This patient is difficult
- I don't know what to do about my career
- I can't follow this paper
Anything, however casual. ChatGPT will come back with something.
Of course it does not truly understand feeling. But because it
- does not push back too hard
- organises what you said as it goes
- holds a steady tone
- is there 24 hours a day, all year
it makes a genuinely good sounding board.
The more context you give, the better it gets
One of ChatGPT's defining traits is that it takes the flow of the conversation into account.
So even if you start vague, adding
- background
- circumstances
- purpose
- what is troubling you
a little at a time raises the quality of the answers. This is the part people call "prompting".
Compare
"Tell me about low back pain."
with
"I want to work out how to explain things to a woman in her seventies with chronic low back pain, high anxiety, and declining activity levels."
The second gets you something far more specific. You do not have to write good prompts from the start — adding context as you talk is enough.
A prompt to try
You are a teacher who knows generative AI well. For a therapist who is completely new to it, explain in about 300 words what ChatGPT is, and what it can and cannot do, using analogies a middle-school student would follow.
Chapter 2 summary
- ChatGPT is a large language model that predicts how language continues
- The innovation was making it usable by anyone in a chat window
- Rough questions are fine at first; add context as the conversation goes