Most of us are impressed with how well Artificial Intelligence (AI) has recently advanced, but we’re still struggling to use it to improve our personal productivity. We’ve heard of the promises but fear the shortcomings, too. Books like Valentina Alto’s Practical Generative AI with ChatGPT can point the way to us capitalizing on the promise in our personal work.
Alto briefly covers the topic of Prompt Engineering that’s key to making the most out of AI. She also takes a couple of deep dives into examples like how to use AI in marketing and research projects. Her approach is not to have AI do all the work for you, but rather to use it as a helpful, brainstorming assistant that cuts down on repetitive tasks like looking up references or graphical tasks that may be beyond a user’s expertise. This approach is key to not losing human autonomy over the creative process.
Concerning writing a research paper, she investigates how to use AI throughout the whole process. You supply the idea but then use AI as a conversational partner – almost a mentor – to explore how to pursue an entire project, especially gathering the background literature and formulating a methodology.
I’m somewhat more wary about using AI to develop marketing materials, but marketing is admittedly not my field either. Researchers, too, have to be wary about borrowing individual snippets of text from AI (i.e., plagiarizing from AI), but Alto shows how to use it more for ideas than for research products. Figuring out who to talk to about what is a large problem when pursuing research, and AI can supplement, particularly in niche fields without a large expert base.
I did not read this book paragraph-by-paragraph; I instead skimmed each chapter for concepts and slowed down on those most relevant to me. That seems like a helpful reading strategy since many chapters apply only tangentially to every reader. Nonetheless, after reading, I was left more confident in my ability to use AI to accomplish specific tasks and use it as a brainstorming assistant.
AI will continue to transform our world in the next decade, and relevant use cases will certainly continue to emerge. Gathering skills through this book will allow readers to swiftly identify more of the problems they face in their work where AI can help. It’s key that we use it as an assistant, not an expert, but doing so will certainly expedite our productivity and unlock more creativity. That’s not a bad exchange.
Practical Generative AI with ChatGPT: Unleash Your Prompt Engineering Potential with OpenAI Technologies for Productivity and Creativity
By Valentina Alto
Second Edition
Copyright © 2023, 2025
Packt
ISBN13 9781836647850
Page Count: 370
Genre: Artificial Intelligence
www.amazon.com