Are You Better than a Bot?—How You Can Differentiate Yourself from ChatGPT

“All your base are belong to us.” – Zero Wing

Are you smarter than ChatGPT?   Maybe.   But rather than be smarter, really it’s really a game of “better together.”

Welcome to the age of augmented humanity.

As some folks have been saying, it’s not AI that will replace humans.  It’s humans using AI that will replace humans that don’t.

So, a resourceful mindset is to challenge yourself with the question:

How can you leverage ChatGPT so you can do what you do best?

And that raises the question, what can you do best, better than any bot?

You can use your very human skills of creativity, empathy, and critical thinking.

Some say that Creative Vision is one of humanity’s greatest gifts, but often underutilized.

If there’s one thing I noticed over 20+ years at Microsoft, it’s that innovators are exemplars of creativity, empathy, and critical thinking.

And if there’s one thing the world needs now, it’s innovation-driven growth.

We’ve behaved our ways into problems that we need to innovate our way out of, so now is the time to inspire a world of innovation.

Imagination is More Important Than Knowledge

I’ve been using ChatGPT as an innovation assistant and to inspire creativity.   ChatGPT helps me play through ideas and puts a vast amount of information at my fingertips.

I remember the day long ago that I realized that the Cloud makes it possible for anybody to spin up a datacenter.

Talk about empowering entrepreneurship.

It feels like a similar thing now where ChatGPT puts a vast universe of knowledge at everyone’s fingertips.

Whenever I play with a new technology, I like to figure out how it will be used, how it will be abused, and how it will inspire breakthroughs in business and human potential.

At this stage, I feel like my main limits with ChatGPT are my own creativity and imagination.

It’s also reminding me how empathy plays a key role in making sense of what’s important and how it relates to customer pains, needs and desired outcomes.

And it’s forcing me to really practice my critical thinking skills to try to figure out when is the information true, shades of gray, or factually incorrect.

The good news is that using ChatGPT as an innovation assistant, it’s speeding up my imagination and creativity in ways I didn’t expect.

And Einstein said it best:

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” – Albert Einstein

This is really refreshing.   ChatGPT is not limited to playing “the Devil’s advocate”, which some people only know that role.

By changing the question, I can instantly change the perspective that ChatGPT answers from, so I can rapidly explore a topic from multiple perspectives.

What an incredible innovation assistant.

What are the Best Use Cases for ChatGPT?

Like I said, I’ve been playing with ChatGPT to get a “feel” for it (oh, there’s that empathy kicking in).

I’ve also been keeping track of use cases and examples so I can keep learning how to explore and expand my potential with a supercomputer at my side.

If given a choice between Batman’s supercomputer and ChatGPT, I would choose ChatGPT, any day.

I figured a good sanity check would simply be to ask ChatGPT, what are the best use cases.

Here’s the response:

1. Conversational AI for customer service and support
2. Generating text such as news articles, summaries, and responses
3. Language translation and language generation
4. Chatbots for e-commerce, entertainment, and gaming
5. Virtual writing assistants for authors and content creators
6. Automated content creation and data analysis.

No surprises.

Those are good, broad categories.

But I find that it’s only through using ChatGPT to really relate and understand what’s possible.

So far, in my mind, it’s not what can ChatGPT do.

It’s what ChatGPT can bring out in you in terms of your own creativity and imagination, that makes it so special.

As soon as I thought of ChatGPT as my Innovation Assistant, it’s been a total game changer.

But to really leverage the power of ChatGPT, it helps to first understand it’s strengths and limitations…

Why is ChatGPT Smarter Than Me?

I asked ChatGPT a simple question:

”Why is ChatGPT smarter than me?”

Here is how ChatGPT responded:

“ChatGPT is not inherently ‘smarter’ than you, but it has been trained on a massive amount of text data and can generate responses based on that information more quickly and accurately than a human could.

Additionally, ChatGPT can store and recall vast amounts of information and has been programmed to identify patterns and relationships in that information in a way that a human may not be able to do.

However, humans have unique qualities and abilities such as creativity, empathy, and critical thinking that ChatGPT cannot replicate.”

If I didn’t know any better, I would say that ChatGPT is pretty self-aware and has had some good personal development coaching.

How Can You Differentiate Yourself from ChatGPT?

I asked ChatGPT:

“How to differentiate myself from ChatGPT?”

ChatGPT responded with:

“To differentiate yourself from ChatGPT, you can emphasize your unique experiences, perspectives, and knowledge.

Some ways to do this include:

1. Sharing personal anecdotes and stories that showcase your life experiences
2. Expressing opinions and viewpoints that are different from what ChatGPT might suggest
3. Sharing specialized knowledge or skills in a specific field or subject that ChatGPT might not be able to replicate
4. Incorporating humor and sarcasm in your responses to show a distinct personality
5. Using language, tone, and voice that sets you apart and distinguishes you from ChatGPT.

Remember, as an AI language model, ChatGPT can generate responses based on patterns in its training data, but it cannot truly understand human experiences or express emotions in the same way as a person.”

Can you imagine a world where people are more amusing, more creative, and share their personal stories and specialized knowledge?

That sounds pretty good to me.

Be More Human

It’s time to get your human on.   If you’ve been limiting yourself to logic and routine thought patterns, it might be time to start reflecting on your life experiences, building your empathy, and practicing your creativity.

If you don’t know Edward be Bono, he is originator of the term “Lateral Thinking” and wrote more 70 books on how to think better.

Here are 3 books by Edward de Bono, I recommend starting with:

1. How To Have a Beautiful Mind.  This is the book I wish I started with.   de Bono makes a great case for learning how to be interesting and gives you the tools and techniques to do so.  In a way, it comes down to cultivating your curiosity and sharing your curiosity with others.
2. Six Thinking Hats.    This is THE book that helps you think from multiple perspectives using imaginary hats to represent each perspective.    The ultimate message from de Bono is that anybody can think better if they simply learn how to explore other perspectives.
3. The Mechanism of Mind: Understand how your mind works to maximize memory and creative potential.   What an incredible book.  It’s two books in one: an owner’s manual and a driver’s guide.   de Bono provides one of the best explanations of insight I ever came across.

The first book I read by de Bono was Lateral Thinking when I first joined Microsoft.   I was trying to figure out how did the smart people think so differently.

How did they come up with solutions to solve the impossible?

It was a good book to expose me to the idea of Lateral Thinking, but I appreciated the book far more after I read the books above.

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