💡 How 10 News Industry Leaders Use ChatGPT in Their Personal Lives

A Special Round Up: Insights from Guests on Newsroom Robots as ChatGPT Turns One

Photo by Rolf van Root on Unsplash

It's ChatGPT's one-year birthday! 🎉 Halfway through the year I started asking our podcast guests about how they're using ChatGPT or similar AI tools in their personal lives (shoutout to Mark Briggs for the suggestion). This segment quickly became a fan favorite, offering a glimpse into the diverse and innovative ways people are integrating AI into their daily lives. In celebration of ChatGPT's first anniversary, a tool that's reshaping our work and personal spaces, I teamed up (yep, with ChatGPT itself! 🤖) to bring you a roundup of some of the fun and unique ways Newsroom Robots guests have been using ChatGPT. Let's dive into a year of AI awesomeness!

Jeremy Caplan

Director of Teaching and Learning at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York and Author of Wonder Tools

• Maximizing ChatGPT's capabilities with Plugins: Jeremy, who writes the Wonder Tools newsletter, uses ChatGPT's Substack plugin to research previous posts of his and insights into topics covered by other writers. He uses the Whimsical plugin to help create clear visual diagrams and flowcharts from simple text descriptions. Jeremy also turns to the Wolfram plugin for tasks involving complex mathematics, which supplements ChatGPT's capabilities by performing detailed calculations and analyses based on his specific data inputs.

Nick Diakopoulos

Professor in Communication Studies and Computer Science at Northwestern University and Author of Automating the News: How Algorithms are Rewriting the Media

• A Tutor for Language Learning: During Nick’s sabbatical in Amsterdam, he took up learning Dutch. ChatGPT turned into his bilingual tutor, engaging in Dutch conversations and correcting his grammatical errors while explaining those corrections in English. How cool is that! It's like having a friendly, patient tutor available 24/7!

Mario Garcia

Senior Adviser on News Design and Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, CEO at Garcia Media and Author of AI: The Next Revolution in Content Creation

• A Daily Companion: Mario uses ChatGPT as a part of his daily ritual, engaging in conversations that span a range of topics from politics to literature. This routine, he finds, not only feeds his intellectual curiosity but also keeps him attuned to the evolving capabilities of AI.

Mark Hansen

David and Helen Gurley Brown Professor of Journalism and Innovation at Columbia University and Director of the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute of Media Innovation

• A Coding Assistant: Mark integrates ChatGPT into his workflow as a coding assistant for natural language processing and web scraping, streamlining tasks that previously required extensive coding. This shift allows him to focus more on data analysis and interpretation, significantly reducing the complexities of coding in his projects.

Uli Köppen

Head of the AI and Automation Lab and Co-Lead of BR Data at German Public Broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk

• Creating Bedtime Stories for Children: As a parent to two young daughters, Uli has found a novel use for ChatGPT – crafting bedtime stories. She inputs her daughters' preferences, and ChatGPT delivers fresh, engaging stories. She says this not only delights her children but also sparks their curiosity about how the technology works.

Francesco Marconi

CEO of AppliedXL and Author of Newsmakers: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Journalism

• Scenario Planning: Francesco uses ChatGPT for scenario planning, a critical exercise in personal strategic decision-making. By presenting different hypotheses or scenarios to ChatGPT, such as challenges in audience engagement or revenue goals, he utilizes AI to explore various potential futures. This "future casting" helps him prepare for different outcomes and plan strategies accordingly.

Paul Quigley

CEO of NewsWhip

• Business Writing and Rephrasing: Paul has tried out ChatGPT for business writing tasks, mainly to rephrase certain content. However, he finds the output tends to be somewhat generic as Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are trained on existing data, influencing the style and tone of their responses.

Jeff Sonderman 

Founder and CEO of Delta Flow Solutions

• Marketing and Customer Value Proposition Development: Jeff uses ChatGPT to brainstorm and refine marketing strategies and customer value propositions, enhancing the effectiveness of his business communications.

Lynn Walsh

Assistant Director at Trusting News

• Travel Planning: On a recent trip to Glacier National Park and Banff, Lynn used ChatGPT for a structured travel plan. She asked ChatGPT to plan a four-day trip. While she fine-tuned the draft provided by ChatGPT, she said it served as a helpful starting point and gave her a skeleton agenda for her trip.

Simon Willison

Founder of Datasette 

• A Brainstorming Companion: Simon harnesses ChatGPT's potential as a brainstorming tool by asking for 20 ideas instead of just one, ensuring a broad range of suggestions. He says this approach often yields unique thoughts and directions, leading to valuable outcomes like a couple of new software features he brainstormed for his investigative reporting tools. He also creatively uses ChatGPT by asking it to merge concepts from different fields, like blending marketing strategies for a software platform with marine biology elements. Although much of the response might be irrelevant, he says, the occasional creativity from this method can lead to innovative and out-of-the-box solutions.

A big thank you to our guests who've shared their unique ChatGPT experiences and to you, our listeners, for joining us on this journey. Your enthusiasm and curiosity makes this exploration into AI so rewarding. 

Hit reply, I’d love to hear from you. How have you been using ChatGPT in your life?