10 Tips to Effectively Improve Your AI Chatbot Usage

AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT and Gemini, have become powerful tools that can assist with a wide range of daily and professional tasks. However, to ensure you get the most out of them while maintaining security and privacy, it's essential to know the best practices when using them. Here are the top 10 tips to help you maximize the benefits of these innovative technologies:

1. Do: Ask AI for help with brainstorming important decisions.

If you are facing an important decision in your life, whether it's about buying a new car or moving to another house, you can describe the situation to the chatbot. The chatbot will provide you with a useful list of pros and cons, helping you to see the different aspects of the decision more clearly and understand the overall picture.

2. Don't: Use AI to cheat on your school or academic assignments.

Using chatbots by students to get answers for homework assignments is not a good practice. Firstly, this is considered academic cheating, and secondly, teachers can easily detect chatbot usage, which may lead to severe consequences. The same applies to university students, where the consequences might be higher, possibly leading to failing the course. Instead, using a chatbot as an assistant tutor to enhance learning and understanding materials is an excellent and beneficial idea.

3. Do: Use it for proofreading and improving written texts.

Chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini are excellent tools for proofreading your written work. Simply cut and paste the text, or export the document from programs like Google Drive as a Word document and upload it to the chatbot. Then you can ask: "Can you proofread this, please?" If the text is short, the AI will simply provide a more polished version. If it's long, it will discuss stylistic points in addition to the document structure and can provide you with a Word document including tracked changes, or make the suggested changes directly.

4. Don't: Believe everything AI says without verifying its authenticity.

Large language models like ChatGPT tend to be extremely helpful, and this sometimes prompts them to fabricate incorrect information. This phenomenon is known as "AI hallucination." "AI hallucination" refers to false, incorrect, or misleading outputs generated by large AI systems, which often appear coherent and logical in context but are, in reality, fabricated or inaccurate information. This often occurs due to the use of small training datasets, flaws in the model's architecture, or simply the nature of the model statistically predicting the most probable word in a sequence AI hallucination definition from TechTarget. AI chatbots can fabricate non-existent facts, such as scientific studies, legal cases, or even make errors in mathematical problems. For example, while hallucination rates in OpenAI's latest model, ChatGPT-5, are around 1.4% (according to Vectara), this low percentage still requires you to double-check any information provided by AI to ensure its accuracy, as AI outputs may seem plausible but can be meaningless or incorrect AI hallucination in scientific research.

5. Do: Use AI to learn new things and expand your knowledge.

Having an AI like Gemini or ChatGPT gives you almost instant access to a personal tutor on your mobile phone or laptop, who can teach you almost anything you wish to learn. The world is at your fingertips, so choose a topic and start learning. If you wish, you can ask the chatbot to create a customized tutorial for you over a specific period. Although it's not good at teaching physical skills, it can direct you to relevant videos on YouTube showing how to do something, especially if you ask it to.

6. Don't: Let children use AI unsupervised.

According to OpenAI: "ChatGPT is not intended for children under 13, and we ask that children between 13 and 18 obtain parental consent before using ChatGPT." If you are using an AI chatbot with a child under 13, you, the adult, should be the one interacting with it. And we still recommend supervising children over 13 who use it. So, if you want to use the chatbot to create a bedtime story for your children, or allow them to play a game with it, that's fine, as long as you are the one interacting with the chatbot and supervising the content.

7. Do: Use AI to generate code and debug errors.

One of the strengths of AI is its superior ability to write complex code, or you can upload your existing code and ask for help completing or correcting it. This works particularly well in ChatGPT's Agent mode, where you can ask it to program an application in the background, as it may take some time. This is very useful when you need a very specific software solution not available anywhere else, or if you just want it to program a simple game for you. Chatbots can also write code for more professional situations, but it's worth noting that you should ask a programming expert to verify the accuracy of the code as it can make programming errors.

8. Don't: Give AI your credit card number or sensitive financial information.

Other than entering your payment details when signing up for an AI service's Plus or Pro account, we never recommend entering your credit card details in an actual chatbot conversation. It is highly unlikely that an AI chatbot would ask for your credit card details within the chat, but as a matter of security principle, you should never provide them. As AI evolves, so too will the security threats that leverage it and our acceptance of it, and it's very possible that some type of malicious code could hack an AI chatbot or even impersonate it to steal your information.

9. Do: Use AI for entertaining and interactive games.

Chatbots are great for playing entertaining games. You just have to ask them to play Tic-Tac-Toe or to start a game. In fact, they can play most simple board games like chess, checkers, Connect Four, Battleship, and general knowledge games, which are particularly fun. You can even ask the AI to create a text-based role-playing adventure game similar to the old "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. Using the GPTs menu (in the left sidebar) you can search for a custom GPT for a specific game you want to play, such as Dungeons and Dragons, for example.

10. Don't: Rely on it for medical advice or health diagnoses.

If you want to research a specific medical condition, or ask AI to explain what doctors tell you in a simplified way you can understand, it can be very helpful. However, it must be emphasized that AI is not a qualified doctor in any way. AI does a great job explaining complex medical terms, but this does not mean it is qualified to diagnose your health condition based on a list of symptoms you provide it. Again, the general advice of treating ChatGPT and other chatbots as a great tool for brainstorming, exchanging ideas, and discussing topics is correct, but remember that you should always seek the opinion of a qualified medical professional for all medical and health matters.