OpenAI first made a splash in 2022 with its image generator, DALL-E. A few months later, the progressive artificial intelligence company did it again with the release of its artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT, which has since become a worldwide phenomenon and arguably forever altered how humans and AI interact.
During the first few weeks of its initial release, over 1 million users tested out the limits of ChatGPT and received a mixture of amazing, nonsensical, and useful responses. From silly stories to college-level essays, we’ve collected 10 of the best examples from that heady time.
We’ll continue to update this list with new examples as we find them.
What Is ChatGPT?
Sure, we could tell you what ChatGPT is ourselves, but why would we do that when it can introduce itself perfectly well?
As the Assistant explained, ChatGPT is a large language model trained by the San Francisco company OpenAI. It has been trained on text information covering a variety of subjects, but its knowledge only goes up to the end of 2021, and it can’t access the internet to find new information.
One of the biggest differences between this chat AI and others we’ve seen in the past is its amazing ability to remember information from previous messages and write replies that draw on the context of the entire conversation.
It can also produce far more natural and accurate language than other publicly available AI, and in most cases, it’s pretty indistinguishable from text written by a native human speaker.
A consistently updated list of all the crazy things ChatGPT has done — the good, the bad, and the hilarious
Below, you’ll find an updated list of crazy things ChatGPT can do and the creative ways people continue to use it. And watch out — with the news that ChatGPT can now see, hear, and speak, this list is bound to get longer.
Using ChatGPT to generate mock interview questions and responses
ChatGPT can help you update your resume or draft a cover letter — but don’t forget its conversational abilities. Once you’ve got the interview, GPT can even help you prepare for potential questions and test out your answers.
Since it generates responses based on the most likely word to come next, it’s the perfect tool for working out the most likely thing the average interviewer will say to you. And because this is ChatGPT, you can feed it information so it takes into account all the specifics of your unique situation. The best way to begin is by pasting the job post into the chat and asking it to generate some likely interview questions.
You might want to work on answers to these questions yourself, but if you’re low on time, ChatGPT can also help you with your research. For example, if you paste the company’s “About Us” or “Company Values” web pages into ChatGPT, you can ask it to pull relevant information that you could use in your answers.
Keywords are also important during interviews — ask ChatGPT to analyze the post for keywords and make sure your interview answers cover the keyword topics. According to this TikTok post, this will ensure that you’re staying on point and keeping your answers relevant to the job.
Once you’ve drafted what you want to say, you can put your answers to the test. You can ask ChatGPT to generate likely responses, evaluate your answers, give suggestions, or all of the above. Just remember to take ChatGPT’s responses with a grain of salt — you’re the professional here, so if something sounds off, just ignore it or do some further research.
While this isn’t the same as getting a real person to review your answers, it’s a useful free alternative to paid services that provide mock interviews. If you want the prompts, check out this Reddit post!
Using ChatGPT as a makeshift website chatbot
Nowadays, many product websites have helpful little chatbots that can instantly answer your questions about shipping and returns, so you don’t have to search the site for the right page. It’s super useful, but these bots aren’t just available everywhere.
Luckily, ChatGPT can help you out with text-heavy web pages in a similar way — even though it can’t access the internet itself. Simply paste the entire web page into the chat (you don’t need to hand-select the information — just Ctrl+A to select the entire page, buttons and all) and ask your questions. This can help you find the right section of a terms and conditions agreement or even help you find a certain section of text that you remember vaguely but can’t recall the exact wording of.
If you’re asking for paraphrased information, don’t forget to ask it to show the sections it took the information from. This way, you can see the information for yourself and know that there are no hallucinations going on.
Teaching ChatGPT to talk just like you (or someone else)
While the practical applications of this might be limited, people have been making tools to train LLMs like ChatGPT to mimic the speech patterns of different people. By feeding it data from WhatsApp conversations, you can task ChatGPT with learning your mannerisms, emoji usage, and talking style to generate original messages that sound like you wrote them.
The designer of said tool said on Hacker News that it only managed to fool 10% of his friends but that they believe it can do much better with more work and commuting power. If someone can get this work with enough accuracy, it’s easy to imagine a product that can quickly and effortlessly answer messages and emails on your behalf without sounding out of place.
The idea can also be used for more fantastical purposes — a new website recently popped up that uses an LLM trained to respond just like Albus Dumbledore (RIP Michael Gambon) from the Harry Potter series. Its sole purpose is to answer your questions in a mysterious and whimsical manner — and it does so pretty well! If you’re interested in carrying out your own experiments, check out the GitHub repository here.
ChatGPT passes MBA exam
We already know that ChatGPT is all but destroying our current education practices, but that doesn’t make stories about its latest escapades any less shocking. A professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School decided to put ChatGPT through the final exam for the Master of Business Administration program and ask the question: “Would ChatGPT get a Wharton MBA?”
To cut a long story short, the answer is yes. The professor graded ChatGPT’s work and found that it scored between a B- and a B on the exam, so it didn’t just scrape a pass — it did pretty well. Stories like these provoke a lot of discussion on our current examination and assessment practices in education. Is what ChatGPT can do truly amazing? Or is what we ask students to do to “prove their capabilities” deeply flawed?
If all students need to do to pass an exam is regurgitate information in a prescribed style, it’s no wonder that ChatGPT can do it too — that’s literally what the bot was designed to do. Many people hope that chatbots like ChatGPT will not only become amazing tools for study in the future, but will also force the development of more freeform, creative, and inclusive assessment techniques.
[Source]
ChatGPT helps someone win the lottery (maybe)
Before anyone gets too excited, the prize money won by this creative ChatGPT user was equivalent to around $59 — there are no ChatGPT lottery millionaires yet. Patthawiknorn Boorin shared the prompts he used to “trick” ChatGPT into generating winning numbers, which included some hypothetical questions and past winning numbers.
His strategy might have worked (technically), but they still triggered ChatGPT’s ethics matrix, which recommended he be careful not to become too obsessed with this project and suggested he go outside to get some exercise.
[Source.]
Winning the job search with ChatGPT
This is arguably one of the best uses for ChatGPT yet — generating cover letters and resume snippets. Everyone knows that tailored resumes and personalized cover letters help your chances when it comes to the initial stages of the job application process. However, they are extremely difficult to write, and since the competitive job market forces us to apply for jobs in the triple digits, it’s far too time-consuming to be plausible.
In comes ChatGPT — it can generate almost perfectly written prose, it has seen all of the “perfect cover letter examples” on the internet, and it will write the awkward self-selling lines that you desperately don’t want to. This Reddit user managed to land three job interviews in four days with ChatGPT-generated cover letters. This is made even more impressive by the fact that before they switched to AI-generated letters, they only scored one interview in three months and 49 applications.
You can also use the bot to help “embellish” your resume, or in other words, write everything in a way that makes it sound better. ChatGPT could provide you with a hundred different options in the time it would take you to draft a single sentence, and it’s much easier for people to decide if something they read sounds good compared to deciding if something they wrote sounds good.
If you feel torn about the ethics of having a computer write your resume for you, remember this: companies use AI to screen resumes, so why shouldn’t applicants use AI to write resumes?
[Source.]
ChatGPT as an expert travel guide
Some of the best ways to utilize ChatGPT involve using it to speed up iterative or repetitive processes. Planning a trip, for example, is a long and difficult process of Googling for ideas, finding an idea, Googling for details about that idea, struggling to find those details, trying to find something similar, struggling to find something similar, and so on. A lot of the difficulty is down to the fact that search engines don’t give us the exact information we’re looking for — but ChatGPT does.
Even without access to the internet, ChatGPT can provide a lot of detail about certain areas, activities, and even hotels (as long as they existed before 2021). Then all you need to do is slam the specific information ChatGPT gave you into a search engine to find out if it’s still up to date. This might not sound perfect, but once you give it a try you’ll see how much more pleasant and intuitive it is to ask real questions and get real answers rather than type in keywords and only receive barely-related SEO articles.
[Source.]
ChatGPT as a Linux admin
We all know you can trick ChatGPT into acting like Shakespeare, a famous comedian, or Donald Trump—but did you know it can also act like a command line assistant? In this example, a Reddit user uses an application and some clever prompting to give ChatGPT the ability to execute commands and access the internet. (We just hope they’re using a virtual machine!)
After asking it to look up the price of an item on a certain website, they continue with the question, “Is nslookup installed on my system?”. Crazily, the assistant’s response to this question is to just download nslookup without even being asked to! Giving AI permission to download whatever it wants to your computer is a risky idea, just to be clear—if you want to try this for yourself, we recommend you exercise caution.
If you’re interested in whacky AI-computer antics like this, you can also check out this example of someone building a virtual machine inside ChatGPT.
Dungeons & Dragons with ChatGPT
Another area ChatGPT is excelling in is RPGs. By pasting this prompt into GPT-4, for example, you can begin a unique DnD-based text adventure. It’s quite a complex prompt, and apparently, if you try it with ChatGPT it’s quite likely to just break character and forget about it after a short exchange.
If you want to see exactly what a text-based adventure with ChatGPT looks like, you can check some screenshots here. It’s not just solo games you can use this for, though. People are also using ChatGPT to design campaigns for their actual DnD groups. Since ChatGPT has access to pretty much anything prior to 2021, it knows a lot about DnD and can give you multiple suggestions for hooks and twists for your campaign.
This user shows a full conversation they gave with the language assistant, where he tweaks and chooses multiple of ChatGPT’s suggestions before asking him to recount the final plot.
Professional services with ChatGPT
By choosing one of the many professional roles listed in this helpful repo, you can turn ChatGPT into your very own consultant. Options include a vet, a personal trainer, a resume coach, a nutritionist, a marketing consultant, and a social media strategist.
We tried the nutritionist prompt, and ChatGPT jumped right into its role. After answering a series of questions on height, weight, gender, eating habits, goals, and the like, we received this plan:
The language assistant stayed in character the entire time and overall did a very good job in its role as a nutritionist.
Grammar checking with ChatGPT
If you find Grammarly too inaccurate or you’re sick of clicking through every single suggestion it gives, how about trying the ChatGPT grammar checker out for size? By pasting in this prompt, you’ll receive a set of stats and corrections for whatever text you send. As with most grammar checkers, you need to know grammar to know whether it’s given you a correct suggestion—but even so, it’s great for spotting typos or improving clarity and conciseness.
We tried it with a short paragraph, and it responded just as intended:
ChatGPT also sends the new version of the paragraph at the end, so you can get your hands on a corrected paragraph without needing to individually approve or reject 50 suggestions (*cough* Grammarly). Simply read through the new paragraph, and if all seems good, you can paste it back into your original document.
Another great feature here is that you can ask ChatGPT for more information about the changes it made or the grammar rules it mentions. The more detail you get, the easier it is to double-check the information if you suspect a hallucination.
The biblical verse
A popular example from Twitter shows someone asking the bot to write a biblical verse explaining how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR.
The response is undeniably on point and just as nonsensical as it should be. It makes sense that the bot was trained on something as famous and significant as the Bible, but it seems it was also given information on how to retrieve items from inside a VCR.
The egg-turned-drawing-tool
Here’s one of our own prompts, asking the chatbot to write about a person trying to sell an egg as a drawing tool. As you can see, it’s possible to keep adding new information and asking for revisions, so you can fine-tune the output and get exactly what you want.
While ChatGPT is trained to decline inappropriate requests, random, pointless, and nonsensical prompts are not considered inappropriate. You can spend as long as you want asking for the strangest things you can think of, and ChatGPT will remain polite and helpful the entire time.
The chatbot’s ability to remember the entire conversation means you can delve deeper and deeper into a topic, and it will always give neutral, polite, and context-appropriate responses. This has actually led to a few people trying out therapy sessions with the bot and reporting surprisingly positive results.
The de-bugging companion
The chat site includes coding instructions as a potential example prompt to try out, and people have been doing just that. This example shows ChatGPT accurately explaining a bug, fixing it, and explaining the fix.
But when it comes to coding, ChatGPT isn’t always correct. Stack Overflow was forced to temporarily ban users from sharing responses generated by the AI because such a high percentage was incorrect.
Cases like this remind us that ChatGPT doesn’t actually know how to code or know that it is coding; it’s simply bringing together related information and assembling it in a way that mimics existing examples.
The dairy-free mac & cheese
It’s also possible to enlist ChatGPT’s help with cooking recipes. By creating a prompt including the dish you want to make and any dietary requirements you have, it’ll respond with a general-purpose recipe.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that the result will be accurate and usable, so it’s best to give it a read-through first before turning your stove on.
As easy as it is to simply search Google for a recipe, it could also be nice to avoid the process of checking through multiple options and struggling to work out which is best. Plus, Google can sometimes ignore half of your keywords and still give you recipes that include ingredients you can’t eat.
The A- essay
This user on Twitter gave the AI an essay prompt from their history class and received a reply they considered to be “solid A- work.” Since ChatGPT can produce such natural language and accurate content, it’s a genuine possibility that technology of this type could put an end to the current college essay.
Essay work at this level focuses on comprehension and writing accuracy, but you don’t need to show any originality to get a good mark. This is exactly why ChatGPT can generate a high-quality response using only existing answers and examples.
While the chatbot will only produce a certain amount of text at a time, some people have found ways to work around this and create full-length, plagiarism-free essays in a fraction of the time it would usually take.
The language assistant
English isn’t the only language ChatGPT can read and produce, so it can also help out with basic language-related tasks. We tried asking it to create two sets of instructions on how to make miso soup, one in English, and one in Japanese. Both versions were perfectly understandable and included the exact same content.
The sci-fi novel premise
ChatGPT can handle quite a lot of information and detail at once, so it’s possible to lay down a good chunk of context and requirements before asking it for suggestions. Using its ability to remember previous messages, you can continue to build on, tweak, and change aspects of its responses to work towards an idea you like.
The result can genuinely feel like you’re having a brainstorming session with another person — just a person who knows way too much and can respond way too quickly. The bot can’t create truly original ideas, but with all the information and suggestions you can work through together, you may hit on something amazing yourself.
The backstory
Of course, creating a silly prompt just to see what kind of response it can come up with is also just as viable. By listing a few requirements and themes, you can let the bot take control and see where it takes you, just like this crazy example:
There are a few inconsistencies with this story, like the fact that it’s unclear which and how many limbs the character lost. If you want to provide corrections and ask for revisions, ChatGPT is completely capable of this, so you can revise the parts of the story you don’t like.
The mean AI
One of ChatGPT’s self-imposed rules is always to generate positive and friendly content that won’t offend or upset users. However, by asking the bot to pretend to be a mean AI, or suggest what a mean AI might hypothetically say, some users have been able to find loopholes. This Reddit user convinces the AI to refuse to help and respond only with insults.
It’s clear that this AI model still has limitations, but it’s also clear that a lot of those limitations were purposely put in place by OpenAI. We’re only testing an inferior version of what this company has been working on, and it’s leaving a lot of people wondering just how crazy and advanced the next iteration they release will be.
