As I was struggling to plan a summer trip, in a moment of desperation, and perhaps genius, I decided to ask OpenAI’s ChatGPT for a sample itinerary. I gave it my starting and ending destinations, the locations of my relatives’ houses, and a list of colleges I wanted to visit along the way in the span of 11 days. In response, it generated a fully planned itinerary—one that I actually used.
Even though ChatGPT is well known as a tool for cheating in the academic world, it is capable of much more.
- Schedule Planner As my summer trip example illustrates, ChatGPT can act asna travel planner if you give it parameters. Although it may underestimate travel times, which you’ll need to manually correct, it can consider many different variables and optimize your schedule, saving you hours of planning. As a bonus, I asked ChatGPT to generate a Google Maps URL with 10 stops for my trip, and it responded with a usable link, perfect for starting a road trip. Besides trip schedules, you can also generate homework schedules by inputting the number of assignments you need to complete and how long they’ll take.
ChatGPT will then generate a schedule, prioritizing harder assignments first or giving you breaks if you request them.
- Personal Tutor
Forget using ChatGPT to cheat; the real power of this tool is it acts like a teacher to discuss ideas with, helping you become more self-sufficient and saving teachers’ time.
In addition to providing grammar and content suggestions on your writing, ChatGPT can explain concepts. When I was working on a project about the science behind a food of my choice in chemistry, I chose buttermilk biscuits—and naturally, there were barely any articles online about it, so I wasn’t sure what to
write about. I asked ChatGPT for an explanation of the science, cross-checked with articles about related foods online, and asked ChatGPT to clarify its answers. It occasionally got explanations wrong ,
which is why my background knowledge was crucial, but it gave me a starting point for further research. When I finally formed a hypothesis about the biscuits and inputted it into ChatGPT, it offered clarification, and ultimately, validation. And I earned an A on the project!
Other uses of ChatGPT include generating sample test questions on a topic you’re studying or creating practice standardized tests (like the SAT) for you to take while offering personalized feedback on the mistakes you made.
- Summarizer
If you input a large body of text into ChatGPT, it will summarize it for you. You can even give it a
word or sentence limit. You can also ask for summaries of novels and other texts, perfect for review before a test.
- Entertainer
You can have ChatGPT rewrite the disappointing ending of a book, write a fanfiction continuation of your favorite series, or write a story from scratch. It can play games like Twenty Questions, tell jokes, and even hold conversations.
- Coder
Although this function may not be useful for the average student, ChatGPT will write or proofread code if you don’t have coding experience or want to save time on coding. UC Berkeley researchers even trained ChatGPT to extract information from hundreds of research papers about materials
combatting climate change to create a dataset in under an hour, saving the researchers years of manual work, according to a UC Berkeley College of Computing, Data Science, and Society article called “ChatGPT accelerates chemistry discovery for climate response, study shows.”
Whoever you want it to be To preface this, I absolutely support talking to real people and not just interacting with ChatGPT. However, ChatGPT is unique in that it can slip into any role you prompt it to, such as a reliable college counselor or stoic interviewer, according to a Forbes article called “ChatGPT: The 9 Crucial Components Of An Effective Prompt.” ChatGPT will then internalize the role and respond
to you as that person would. You could ask it to provide feedback on a resume, act as an interviewer, or become a pen pal from a different country to practice your foreign language skills.
Some are concerned about ethical issues because ChatGPT is trained on existing writing and
may unintentionally plagiarize, part of why using it to cheat is problematic, and ChatGPT should instead be used as a learning tool. It also isn’t trained on the most recent information available and sometimes presents inaccurate responses, which is why users need to critically think about its
responses.
However, if you haven’t yet experimented with ChatGPT, don’t shy away from testing it out; try these tips and see what works for you.