“Hey Howu?” problem is when an user asks ChatGPT ‘Hey’ or something plain, and in return, of course, ChatGPT provides a plain answer such as ‘How are You?’ or any other materially equivalent answer. Thus the user isn’t educated about the productive possibilities of using ChatGPT.
Why should you care about this? If you are reading this we can likely say there’s 100% chance that you are not stuck on this stage of prompting ChatGPT, but millions of users are, and there are billions of people even beneath this - not using ChatGPT at all. I believe many will agree with me that equitable AI is not just about perfecting some highly niche programming task, but also about empowering millions of regular kind-hearted people who haven’t yet internalized the usages of ChatGPT as highly as advanced users or domain experts.
Here are my ideas on tackling this, this is just inspirational - hopefully others can deal with specificities and provide improved approaches:
- Provide a visual guidance. Whether it’s a popup above chatbox, sidebar form with instructions, or ChatGPT asking an user what he does for a living/hobbies etc. the actual visual guidance towards exploring further possibilities will make a statistical impact over large amounts of potential users.
- Understand when an user is inexperienced. One semi-naive approach could be the sheer amount of prompts, if person A is asking ChatGPT hundreds of technical questions a day, and person B is asking some general question just a few times a week, there is high possibility that person A is simply deriving a lot of value, otherwise he wouldn’t use it, and that person B doesn’t do the same due to inexperience. But of course volume isn’t the only nuance to detecting experience of an user.
- Very important - external vs internal perspective on a job. Let’s say ChatGPT has identified an AI newbie, the user has provided an idea of what it is they are doing for a living and expect further assistance. This is where the distinction of external vs internal job perspective comes into play. For example, you might say that an accountant provides you with financial statements and tax forms and you would be right, but this is an external perspective, however from an internal perspective the accountant is dealing with CSV,PDF,XLSX files and so on, various webforms, structuring charts of accounts, various financial monitorings and other domain details that ChatGPT knows well about even if it’s not visible to an inexperienced user. The value of a general/external perspective that many AIs lean towards commonly providing with enthusiasm - is basically 0 if you are already employed or know the field well.
Things to consider for each of these points:
- Should be as least invasive as possible otherwise people will be turned off
- Touches on user privacy but who cares about that in 2k25 amiright
- Too many system adjustments to the prompt output will theoretically make it less understandable what is the actual raw capability of AI