The ChatGPT Revolution, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 4It's all about the prompts

My colleague Sophie has always been fascinated by the French language. When I worked with her, she was not only fluent, but she also sounded like she had been born and raised in France.

She told me she had taken a few classes in high school, but they never stuck. At college, she decided to major in French, but found herself still struggling to master the language. No matter how much she studied and practised, she couldn't seem to make progress, which she found demoralising and almost led to her giving up.

It wasn't until her second year that she discovered the key to unlocking French. She had been struggling with a particularly difficult passage from a novel, and had been translating every word separately. Frustrated, she took a break and decided to read the passage out loud, without trying to translate every word.

To her surprise, she found that she could understand the passage much more easily when she stopped focusing on the individual words and instead focused on the overall meaning. She realised that to truly understand a language, she had to learn to think in that language, rather than constantly translating everything back to her native language.

If you're looking to get the most out of ChatGPT or any other platform, you've got to know a thing or two about the language it speaks. You also have to learn to think a bit differently to how you engage with search engines like Google.

Compared to ChatGPT, using the Google search engine is ...