8 Surprising Things You Can Do With ChatGPT

If you’ve heard about ChatGPT and think it’s just a fancy chatbot, you might be underestimating the range of what it can do. Here are some surprising things you can do with ChatGPT, whether you want to write a resume or have it dungeon-master an epic role-playing adventure.

What Is ChatGPT?

Not super familiar with ChatGPT? No worries. It, and similar AI engines, are still quite new. You can take a deep dive into ChatGPT, and we can even help you learn how to use ChatGPT, but here’s a quick summary before we look at some of the more novel ways you can use the AI chat service.

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ChatGPT is an algorithmic AI chat system trained on a massive collection of internet-based resources (websites, forums, documents, and so on) to provide a human-like response to inquiries. And not just simple “How are you doing today?” with a response of “I am doing fine, thank you for asking,” type of chat responses like you might have gotten from a chatbot in the past.

You can ask ChatGPT questions with complex answers, and it will do its best to respond based on its understanding of the question, the context, and all the material stored in its data set.

Interestingly, and quite relevant to what we’re talking about here, it isn’t limited to just answering questions like an interactive encyclopedia. It can be asked to perform tasks, analyze texts, and even play with you.

Now, a word of caution before we continue. ChatGPT is in its infancy, and many potential legal aspects have yet to be ironed out. ChatGPT terms of service allow you to use anything produced by ChatGPT for commercial purposes. But because ChatGPT results are effectively an amalgam of everything ChatGPT has learned, mashed up and spit back out for your benefit, it’s quite possible portions of what ChatGPT gives you are pieces of existing works. With that in mind, we would encourage everyone to play around with it and have fun, but be cautious in using it in any way that could result in you getting an unwelcome letter from a copyright lawyer.

That warning out of the way, let’s look at the interesting things ChatGPT can do, starting with the mundane but useful and moving onto some of the more novel uses.

Write a Cover Letter

Not a huge fan of writing cover letters? Nobody could blame you. It turns out you can farm the job out to AI, and the results are perfectly passing as something written by a person.

You can even instruct ChatGPT to write a cover letter for a particular position or industry. Naturally, you will need to edit the letter to reflect your exact skillset, certifications, and so on, but the template ChatGPT generates is solid. We asked it to write a cover letter for a recent college graduate applying for a junior developer position.

What it produced was a great template to start from, tweaking it slightly to reflect your accomplishments, of course, and not the theoretical ones it filled in.

Write a Resume

Again, resume writing isn’t something people consider a thrilling activity. All the more reason to ask ChatGPT to write one up for you.

Like the cover letter, you’ll need to review the text and edit anything that is a bit too generous in describing your job responsibilities, but overall it’s a fast way to generate a template you can easily adapt. It even leaves fill-in-the-blank sections for job titles, company names, and dates worked.

As an aside, I thought it was particularly appropriate and quite funny that when I asked it to write me a resume for a network engineer, the request failed because of a network error.