Welcome to the Listening Time podcast.
Hey English learners.
This is Connor and you're listening to episode 257 of the Listening Time podcast.
I hope you're doing great.
I hope your English learning is going well and that this podcast has helped you improve your listening comprehension.
In today's episode, I'm going to talk about chat GPT.
And in particular, I'm going to talk about how I use chat GPT.
People use AI for many different purposes and reasons nowadays.
And so I'll talk a little bit about how I use it.
So I'm sure this will be a fun episode.
Many people like talking about this.
And before we start, remember that if you need my help to improve your pronunciation and your listening, then make sure to join my membership so you can get my specialized pronunciation training and listening training.
That link to sign up is down below.
And also check out my US Conversations podcast if you want to start listening to my conversations that I have with other English teachers from all around the country.
It's great practice for your listening and it's also a lot of fun.
That link is also down below.
Okay, let's talk about ChatGPT.
I've recently started to use this tool more.
In the past, I didn't use it much, but recently I've started using it a lot more frequently.
It has become a very useful tool for me, and perhaps I don't use it for anything the things that other people use it for but I have found some different things that it has come in handy for.
When something comes in handy, this means that it proves to be useful or helpful for you, so I
The first thing that I want to talk about one thing that ChatGPT has been very helpful for is learning about certain subjects.
This could be just for fun, out of curiosity, or things that are more important to me.
So recently I read a book about the English language and I wanted to dig deeper, as we might say like go further into the subject.
And so I started asking questions chat GPT, different questions related to languages.
For example, I wanted to know how close the Swedish and Norwegian are, or Danish and Norwegian, and I wanted to compare The closeness between these languages with the closeness between Spanish and Portuguese and different things like that.
I started asking a lot of language-related questions, not just about English, but other languages and potential influences between English and other languages.
So ChatGPT is great for things like that.
I can ask a really specific question and get a very detailed answer.
That was very cool to learn about. different languages using chat GPT.
I also use it to ask about usages of certain English words.
There are some words that I feel like I know how to use them.
I feel like I know their meaning, but not quite.
And this is specifically the case when it comes to older words, more archaic words that aren't really used that much nowadays.
Sometimes I feel like I know the meaning and sometimes the usage of these words.
But then i check the meaning and usage using chat gbt and i realize that i was a little off meaning.
I wasn't a hundred percent correct in my assumptions.
So it has been helpful to learn the usage of certain words in English that I'm not 100 comfortable with.
So all these questions related to language and words, these are things that have learned a lot about by using chat GPT, so those things are things that it has helped me with.
These are mostly things just out of curiosity, for fun, but these are things that I want to learn, so I
That has been helpful to have ChatGPT to ask it those questions.
And not only do I use it for these fun questions, questions that are just from my curiosity or interest.
I also use it to get important information that I absolutely need.
And, of course, you can just use the Internet in general to get whatever information you're looking for.
However, using ChatGPT helps in the sense that you don't have to scour the internet, meaning you don't have to do this extensive research and look through all the results and see what they say, and that takes a while Whereas chat GPT can give you a very detailed, specific response that includes the different information that you need.
And you can ask it a very specific question and talk about your specific answer.
For example, and that's something that you can't do very easily without AI.
So, for example, just recently there was a health related issue. that I needed information about.
Someone close to me had a health issue and I really needed to know what to do in that situation, what warning signs to look out for, meaning signs that there could be something serious and you need to go to the emergency room, for example.
So i needed to know those signs, what to watch out for like, what to be aware of, what to look for in terms of possible dangerous situations that we wanted to avoid.
And so it was really helpful to use ChatGPT in this situation, because I was able to describe the exact situation that this person was in their exact symptoms, their exact situation and it was very helpful.
It told us the exact things we needed to look out for the exact warning signs, the probability of the situation being one thing or another thing, depending on the specific details we were giving it.
So it was very useful.
And I love that we can personalize the question and ask a question that is very specific and includes the details regarding that specific person, and then ChatGPT can tailor its response, meaning it can adapt its response to your specific question.
So that was really helpful and you can see that I don't only use it for fun questions.
I use it for important questions as well.
Another thing that I used ChatGPT for recently was planning travel itinerary.
I'm planning a trip to Greece for my family. myself and my family in a few months.
And I have used ChatGPT to help me a little bit with some questions I have about the itinerary.
I booked a flight that had a layover and and it was the perfect layover.
I was happy with the flight, but then the airline contacted me and told me that that flight was going to be changed, and then I had a different layover that was completely unreasonable, like we had 20 minutes between the two flights, so it was just ridiculous.
So i had to change the flight and eventually i got a flight with what seemed like reasonable layover, enough time at that airport to transfer between the two flights.
But I wasn't quite sure and so I asked chat GPT.
I gave it my exact details, the exact date and times and where we're flying from, where we're flying to.
And it gave me a very detailed response about the chances of that layover being a problem, like perhaps we will miss the second flight because we don't arrive in time, or whatever.
It gave me a really helpful answer.
It even told me about the chances of a delay that I might have in LAX, the airport in Los Angeles where I'm flying from.
It even told me about my chances of having a delay due to fog, like when you can't see, because everything in the air is all white and misty, like a cloud low to the ground almost.
So we have a lot of fog by the coast during certain months here.
And it just so happens that our flight will be during the fog season.
When I say it just so happens, I'm saying that this... happened by chance, by accident.
So we have our flight during the fog season.
So I wanted to know what the chances were of this flight being delayed due to fog and what impact that would have on the rest of the trip.
Like even if there were some kind of delay, would it affect our second flight?
Like would we still be able to transfer to the other airplane in time for the second flight?
So I was asking very specific questions.
And it was giving me very specific answers.
It was even talking about which terminal we would probably arrive at and which terminal our next flight would be, and how long it would take to get from one terminal to the next terminal at that airport, the Philadelphia airport.
So it was extremely helpful.
And I'm definitely going to continue using it for these types of questions.
I'm going to give it very personal, particular details so that it can help me understand my itinerary better, how realistic it is possible risks, things like that.
It was very useful when planning for that and I'm sure it will still come in handy as I continue planning my itinerary.
Another usage of ChatGPT.
Something I used it for very recently, was when I went to the grocery store and I had to pick a good pineapple.
This is always something that I suck at.
When you suck at something, it means you're very bad at it.
It's kind of a rude way of saying you're bad at something.
So, I suck at choosing good watermelons and pineapples and whatever, papayas, things like that.
I'm not good at choosing a good one.
So I had to ask ChatGPT to help me because I saw a bunch of pineapples Some of them were more brown.
Some of them more green.
Some of them had a lot of yellow.
So I had no idea which one to choose.
And so I asked ChatGPT to help me choose one.
I also asked it to help me choose a good papaya.
But according to what it told me, there probably wasn't a good option at that store because none of the papayas fit that description properly that it gave me.
So it helped me choose fruit recently.
Perhaps you can use it for the same purpose the next time you go to the grocery store.
And recently i even argued with chat gpt.
That's something else i did with chat gpt recently.
I wasn't trying to argue with it, but I was asking it a question and it wasn't giving me an answer that I liked because I could tell it was kind of biased, meaning it wasn't being completely objective in its answer, and I knew that.
I knew it was just drawing from information on the Internet, of course.
And when it comes to this particular topic, the information on the Internet is very subjective.
And so I was arguing with it.
I was pushing back. and showing it that it wasn't using logic in some of its responses.
And it even accepted that that my points were valid, but it still tried to argue with me and tell me that some of my points were wrong.
And it was interesting that I had this full on argument with AI and I actually got a little frustrated with it.
It seemed like I was arguing with a person who just didn't want to accept certain things.
I was saying it was weird, to be honest.
I don't plan on doing that again, but I wanted to mention this because it's interesting how We can almost forget that this is not a human and we can get a little emotional when arguing with it or whatever.
It's kind of strange and I didn't enjoy arguing with it and I realized afterwards that it was a very silly thing that I was engaged in this argument with AI.
So I don't think I'm going to do that again.
But it was an interesting lesson for me.
And it showed me how advanced and how good this technology is at Just interacting with you, arguing with you or whatever.
So that was pretty interesting.
That was not something I expected to do.
And so in general.
ChatGPT has helped me learn things, plan things, get important information about things, predict things.
It has even challenged me.
It has argued with me.
However, I haven't really used ChatGPT for work.
One time, I think, or twice I used it to try to generate ideas for me, but I didn't really like doing this.
I wasn't satisfied with its responses, its ideas, so I didn't use it after that.
I haven't used it since.
And I don't like using AI to write emails for me.
I know many people do that.
I don't think I will ever do that.
Number one because I like writing and I have a very specific goal, way and style of writing and, quite frankly, i'm pretty good at writing.
It's one of the few skills i have, so i don't really need chat gpt to do that for me and save me 30 seconds or whatever, because even if I did use it to write my emails
I would check those emails and probably change things.
So it would end up taking me longer than it sounds probably.
So I don't use it for that.
I don't use it for anything else related to my job, really.
Oh, one thing I do use AI for, not ChatGBT, is with my transcripts.
There is an AI tool that I use.
However, I still have to read the whole transcript while I'm listening to the episode and make A lot of corrections to the transcript and punctuate it, well meaning put the periods and the commas in the right places.
I still have to correct a lot.
So it's helpful, but it doesn't do the transcript.
It doesn't generate the transcript how often.
I want it.
So it helps me, but I still have to read everything and make the necessary changes.
So hopefully one day AI transcription tools can help generate more accurate transcripts.
That would be very, very good for me.
Or maybe there will be AI tools that can edit my episodes exactly the way I want them edited.
So those would be very helpful.
But right now, I don't really use AI or ChatGPT for anything besides the transcript.
At least that's my situation right now.
So overall, ChatGPT has improved a lot of things for me.
My ability to get quick information and very personalized information.
It has helped me plan things and understand things better.
It's like a little assistant.
A little assistant that knows everything, or not everything, but it knows many things.
It's very, very good for at least what I use it for, so I'm very satisfied with it.
However, there are some negatives.
Of course, it has a bias sometimes, like I just mentioned.
It can be wrong sometimes and that's a problem, because People sometimes just expect only truth when they ask AI a question, and that is dangerous because you might just accept everything it says as truth and expect that it will never make any mistakes.
That's not the case.
I know a friend of mine who uses it to learn Spanish and sometimes He'll show me ChatGPT's mistakes, like it's telling him the wrong thing in Spanish and then he has to correct it and then ChatGPT realizes its mistake and apologizes.
It can be wrong, of course, and we might trust it too much.
So that's an issue.
And one last thing is that it gives us an illusion of intelligence.
Like we think we can know everything in just a few seconds.
We can know anything and everything now.
Because we can ask ChatGBT whatever we want.
So we feel like we can just learn everything and never need to maybe research things further for ourselves.
Like actually check the sources, compare sources.
Like in the argument that I had with chat GPT, if I hadn't known more about that subject, like I know a lot about that subject.
So I could tell that chat GPT was very biased.
If I hadn't known all the information that I knew, then I probably just would have accepted every single thing ChatGPT was saying, without questioning it.
And that's a problem.
We should still know how to research things for ourselves, see different arguments and look at the sources, compare the two without this bias and just research things.
I still think that it's important to do that.
I think that it's important to form our own opinions without relying completely on chat GPT.
So that's one other negative that i was able to think of, but overall it's a great tool and i use it for different things and i'm sure a lot of you do as well.
I hope you enjoyed this episode and that it was good practice for your listening.
Remember that if you want help improving your pronunciation and your listening, make sure to join my membership so you can get my specialized training, which will help you improve.
That link is down below.
And also check out my US Conversations podcast.
It's great practice for your listening because you listen to yourself.
Real, authentic conversations that I have with other English teachers.
That link is also down below.
Okay, thank you all for listening to this episode and I'll talk to you on the next episode of Listening Time.
