If you use ChatGPT you have certainly noticed that this artificial intelligence is capable of answering all your questions right away. But by digging a little deeper you probably quickly realized that it was not uncommon for this AI to tell you anything while trying to give you a credible answer. It is difficult in these conditions to really trust it.
So before you go back to asking your questions on Google, here are some reasons that may explain why ChatGPT gives you bad answers. Feel free to use this as inspiration to ask better questions that are likely to get good quality answers. Here are some tips to improve ChatGPT's answers.
Your questions are too vague.
Large language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT are built on an unimaginable amount of knowledge and data, making it extremely difficult to give you a satisfactory result if your questions are too broad.
For example, these questions are too vague to be useful:
- Give me some information about the story.
- How to cook a delicious dish?
- What are the best vacation destinations?
- How to get rich quick?
- Help me solve this problem.
- What are the best practices for sport?
- How can I improve my skills?
Instead, you can use more specific questions like these to improve ChatGPT's responses:
- Can you give me some information about the French Revolution and its consequences?
- How to cook mushroom risotto?
- What are the best holiday destinations for beach lovers in Europe?
- What are the investment strategies to increase my income in the long term?
- Help me solve this math problem: How to factor the quadratic equation x^2 – 5x + 6?
- What are the best practices for improving your swimming technique?
- How can I improve my oral communication skills for professional presentations?
These two sets of examples were provided by ChatGPT using the prompts “ I need examples of ChatGPT prompts that are not specific enough to get the result users want " and " For each of these examples, give me better variations, specific enough.". Feel free to use ChatGPT to create your questions or ask for examples of good questions that you can reuse.
By asking specific questions you will get much better answers, and the more specific you are, the better they will be in most cases.
Your questions are too short.
Since ChatGPT is designed as a chatbot, you may have the preconceived notion that your messages should be short and conversational. While there is nothing wrong with that, you may not be giving ChatGPT enough information for it to give you the answers you want.
Go into detail and really explain what you want et what you don't want, while painting a bigger picture for the AI to work with. It's best if your message is longer and more detailed than you think is necessary.
Your questions are ambiguous
One of the main reasons why language models like ChatGPT are so amazing is that human language is complicated, and we see this particularly with French (“ a green glass glass"). ! Unfortunately, this complexity of language also means that it is easy to introduce a lot of ambiguity into your questions.
An ambiguous question is a question that can be interpreted in several equally valid ways.
Sometimes it's a bug in the logic or wording of your message, but more often it's simply because you've asked a question with so many answers that it's difficult for ChatGPT to know what answer you're actually looking for.
So try to make your intention as clear as possible. Please feel free to contextualize your question to help ChatGPT answer you better.
For example, if you ask “ What is the best way to cook a prime rib?", ChatGPT doesn't know what you mean by "better": better tasting, better for your health, better for the environment?
On the other hand, if you ask " What is the best way to cook a prime rib for my health?", you narrow down the possibilities, and if you ask " What is the best way to cook prime rib for an overweight person?", you focus on what you really need.
Your questions lack context.
Ambiguous messages suffer primarily from a lack of context, but almost any type of request posed to ChatGPT will benefit from being contextualized. ChatGPT is very sensitive to contextual information, so the more context you provide, the better your results will be.
You can see this clearly when you ask for something like a writing outline. If you ask for an outline for a blog post, you will get a very different result than if you ask for a book or an academic paper.
If you ask ChatGPT to convert text to a script for a YouTube video, the result will be completely different from what you will get by requesting a script for a TV show.
These are simple examples, but ChatGPT can pick up on nuanced contextual clues, so it's a good idea to get into the habit of elaborating and describing what you want with terms and keywords that give the software clues about what you're trying to get from it.
A good way to do this is to tell ChatGPT to put itself in the shoes of a blogger, a scientist, a historian, etc.
ChatGPT does not have the requested information
While ChatGPT has a phenomenal amount of data to work with, it has a clear limit without its knowledge. Aside from the deadline of the data it was trained on, set at September 2021, there are some things it simply cannot know.
But it is not inevitable.
You can tell him the facts he needs to know for your specific situation or even copy and paste text from sources you want him to use. This new knowledge will not be retained in subsequent chats, but you can use it and ask him to use it in the current conversation.
Please note: ChatGPT will “believe” anything you tell it, so you need to make sure that the information you give it is accurate.
Also, keep in mind that ChatGPT can make things up, give you illogical or incorrect information, and ultimately behave like an unreliable source!
Please feel free to discuss and clarify your questions.
ChatGPT’s ability to remember the entire chat history and use it as context to interpret subsequent messages is one of its most powerful features. It also means you can iterate based on its responses.
Instead of hitting the "Regenerate Reply" button in hopes of getting a better response to your post, you can send a new post that builds on past exchanges in the thread.
Here are some examples of follow-up messages:
- Can you summarize your answer?
- No, I wanted you to write the paragraph in the second person singular.
- Can you rank the list in order of importance?
- ...
In fact, you can modify and transform ChatGPT’s results in just about any way you can think of. So take the time to interact with the tool to improve ChatGPT’s answers, as if you were collaborating with a real person, and you’ll quickly be able to fine-tune its results to exactly what you need.
