You know by now what ChatGPT can do when it comes to writing. It can draft articles, blog posts, video scripts, social media posts, video descriptions, and so on. It can also take a draft you have and fix it up to your specifications – make it shorter, longer, clean up the grammar, turn it into a Q&A, etc.

But ChatGPT is incredibly handy for other things too! Here’s a list of 5 things ChatGPT is good for, other than writing.

Brainstorming

ChatGPT is the perfect friend to help turn a thought into something you can work with. I go there when I have a vague idea floating around my head but don’t have a clear vision of what it would like if I tried to bring it to life. For example, I once had this thought of doing something with court videos – the hearings and trials that are streamed by many courts. I can talk to my buddy, ChatGPT and tell it my idea. I can ask it for suggestions on the different angles I could consider to present this content, the pros and cons of each, ideas for how to monetize it, and anything else I need to think through before giving this idea the green light.

Sometimes the conversation results in me deciding that I do NOT want to implement whatever my vague idea was. That might sound like a bummer, but it’s not. I’m happy to have that idea out of my head so it’s not taking up space from things I’m actually going to do, and I’ve saved a ton of time that I would have spent building something that, if I had just thought it through, I would have realized isn’t right for me at the moment.

Naming things

I wonder how many babies are being named by ChatGPT these days?  I’m not criticizing. ChatGPT saves me hours coming up with names for things… YouTube channel names, website names, usernames, and anything else that requires a unique but short name. I think the reason it’s so good at this task is because you can feed it all the things you want to take into account when providing a list of suggestions. It’s not enough to say “give me some suggestions for a YouTube channel name.” Well, if you have no idea what your channel is going to be about that might be OK. But, that would be a weird way to go about it.

When you tell ChatGPT that you need suggestions to name your YouTube channel and that the channel is about living in your car and the audience you want to reach is females in the US aged 40-54 with a moderate income, now you’re going to get some ideas that line up well with what you’re trying to do.

Tech Support

When the software you’re using doesn’t cooperate you’ve got a few options…

Contact the maker of the software using whatever ridiculous process they have to get help and, after clicking 17 different links and filling in the same information 82 times, wait a few days to see if you get a response suggesting you uninstall and reinstall the software and let them know if that doesn’t work.

Search the internet and check out every forum post where someone else reached out for help with your problem. Find that some of those never got an answer, read through all the snarky, condescending posts from people complaining that OP didn’t provide screenshots and an event viewer dump, and all the completely unrelated posts in the thread until you hopefully find a usable suggestion.

Continue your internet search, now understanding that your situation is different, in an important way, from the issue that is being discussed most on the internet so you need to skip the search results that talk about the issue that’s similar but different from yours – so you don’t end up down a pointless rabbit hole (again.)

Lately, I’ve been going to ChatGPT with my software problems and it’s done a pretty good job of helping me. I can tell it all the details about my setup and situation – all about my computer hardware and software, the application that’s giving me a problem, what the problem is, and it will give me some troubleshooting ideas specific to my problem. I can even tell it that I’ve already re-installed the software to prevent it from giving me that suggestion. When it returns a list of things to explore, and that list includes the suggestion that my computer may not have enough hard drive space, I can tell it that I have 300GB of free space and it will understand we can rule that issue out and fine-tune the suggestions.

Coding for Non-Coders

I’m not a developer or computer programmer by any means and I generally avoid getting myself into things that require me to write anything that looks like code. But, I have written quite a bit of VBA to make excel do exactly what I want and there are occasions where a little bit of css, html, or php are necessary to make my WordPress site function or look the way I want it to.

ChatGPT to the rescue!  I can tell it what I’m trying to accomplish, being as specific as possible about the goal and the details of what software I’m using (like WordPress with Elementor) and ChatGPT will spit out the code and tell me where to paste it.

How Can I…?

Sometimes I’m not even sure where to start with something. For instance, I want my website to have a directory. I want it to be searchable, include images and ratings, and I do not need it to take payments for classified ads or include mapping. I went to ChatGPT recently with this and explained what I’m working with (WordPress), what plugins I currently have installed, and asked it how I could create a directory.

It gave me several options, taking my specific setup into consideration. The suggestions included a plugin that does what I want (it gave the names of a few), manually creating the thing with PHP code, or using a plugin and custom fields with custom post types. It explained the options in about a paragraph each. I explored each one of them further just by asking it, one by one, to tell me more about it. Eventually I opted for the last suggestion and ChatGPT helped me figure out the details of making it work.