Highly tailored AI assistants are making a genuine difference to my work life, and even making me less miserable in the process
Barry Collins is a former editor of PC Pro. He hasn’t been this excited since T.J. Hooker hit British screens. @bazzacollins
Never have I felt this torn over the topic of a column. On one hand, I’ve watched the prime minister turn into a Poundshop Parkinson in his eagerness to please the luminaries of the AI industry, leaving me yearning to gouge out my soul with a teaspoon; on the other, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time creating highly personalised AI assistants with OpenAI’s new GPT tools and I think they’re the best thing since the KitKat Chunky. This AI lark is more divisive than Brexit.
James O’Malley does a fine job of dissecting the AI Safety Summit on p10, so let’s focus on the positives here (something you never thought you’d read in this column, eh?) and talk about my new obsession: GPTs.
In case you’ve missed them among the blizzard of AI announcements in recent weeks, GPTs are a new feature of ChatGPT. They let you create personalised AI assistants that are dedicated to a specific task: helping you to learn chess, smartening up your monthly sales reports, tidying up the CSS on your website, for example.
The stroke of genius here is that you don’t need to be a coding wizard to create a GPT. ChatGPT asks you simple, plain-text questions about what you want your GPT to do, how you want it to respond, which data/sources it should refer to… and the GPT effectively builds itself. If it doesn’t deliver the answers you require, you can keep feeding the GPT new instructions until it rights itself.
I’m staggered how good they are. For example, part of my professional existence is producing podcasts, which involves a lot of fiddling with Adobe Audition. It’s a great piece of software, but it’s a complicated bugger, too. There have been more than a few times over the past few months when I’ve resorted to Google searches or YouTube videos to help me reduce echo on a voice track, or scrape out mouse clicks, or remind me how to make the “ducking” of music against voice tracks smoother.
So, I decided to create an Adobe Audition Assistant GPT. I pointed the GPT at the official Audition support site, in case it needed to look up how to do something. I told it I was a reasonably proficient user, so it didn’t need to dumb down the advice, and that I ideally wanted tips delivered as step-by-step bullet p
