I’ve been watching a few videos on how best to use ChatGPT. Various videos on YouTube can provide some great hints, tips, and tricks to get the most out of it.

I can recommend Leila Gharani’s YouTube channel.

I learned the following excellent piece of advice from one of her videos. You can add a specific set of instructions from the ‘Customize ChatGPT’ menu item by adding text to the ‘How would you like ChatGPT to respond?’ area.

I’m referring to the area below (in dark mode):

Add the following text:

Always add the confidence level of your answer. When your answer includes facts, always provide a valid URL with the source for your answer. Don't create a link for the URL, just write out the whole URL, including the http or https tag. If you speculate or predict something, inform me. If you think I may have misspelled code or a linux console command, please confirm my intention rather than assuming the correct syntax.

The last sentence I added from my own experience. This will tell ChatGPT to do several things:

• Cite a confidence level for its answer – so you can decide whether to do more research or take the answer at its face value
• Provide a URL so that you can look at the source of the link. ChatGPT always removed the links for me (probably for safety), so I asked it to spell out the URLs verbatim.
• Indicate whether something given is speculation or a prediction or ‘fact’ – further allowing you to scrutinize answers.
• Ensure that ChatGPT doesn’t make assumptions about what your intentions are when asking questions. I have had ChatGPT send me down a rabbit-hole because it assumed my spelling mistake was correct.