Using ChatGPT
Understand the chat workflow, give useful context, and check answers and tool results against evidence.
Before you start: Generative AI. Reading time is an estimate; allow extra time for practice.
What you’ll learn
- Turn a set of safe notes into a draft with explicit facts and unresolved questions.
- Choose when a chat needs supplied files, a project or current web sources.
- Check a ChatGPT result against original evidence before using or sharing it.
- Distinguish a proposed action from an action performed by an enabled tool.
On this page
Start with a result you can check
Imagine you are helping a community coding club prepare an invitation. Your notes say the session is on 24 October from 10:00 to 12:00, it has twelve places, beginners are welcome, and participants should bring a laptop. The room booking is still provisional. You want a readable draft, but you must not turn an uncertain booking into a confirmed promise. This is a useful first ChatGPT task because you can inspect every factual claim.
ChatGPT is an application for working with an AI assistant through conversation and available tools. It can help explain, draft, compare and analyse information. A response is generated from the context and capabilities available to that chat; fluent writing is not evidence that every detail is true. Treat the first result as something to examine and improve, especially when someone will rely on it.
This guide uses the chat interface. OpenAI's developer API is a separate way for software to request model outputs; a prompt pasted into ChatGPT is not an API integration. Features, labels and access can differ by platform, account and workspace. The exercise only needs the ability to exchange text, so you can practise without connecting another service.
Give relevant context without exposing people
Before pasting the club notes, remove member names, personal phone numbers and any access code for the room. Use a made-up contact placeholder if the draft needs one. The assistant needs the event facts and intended audience, not the membership register. Make a small clean copy rather than sending an original document with hidden comments, tracked changes or unrelated pages.
Tell ChatGPT what is established, what is provisional and what is missing. For our event, the proposed date and time are supplied facts, the room is provisional, and a booking link has not been supplied. Ask it to preserve these distinctions. If you simply say “write an exciting invitation”, a plausible result may silently add free refreshments, accessibility claims or a registration URL that nobody approved.
Review the data and sharing controls for the account you are using, together with your organisation's rules. Connected services and shared conversations create additional places where information can be seen. A privacy instruction inside the prompt does not replace access controls or permission to upload someone else's information. For this practice task, invented notes remove that dependency entirely.
Ask for an inspectable first draft
Start a fresh chat and paste the complete prompt below. It includes a task, evidence, limits and a requested format. The separate uncertainty list is useful: it gives you something to resolve before publication rather than burying open questions inside polished prose. You do not need a special incantation or an instruction to pretend to be an expert.
Read the draft once for meaning, then compare its dates, numbers, commitments and links with the supplied notes. A good response might say “planned for 24 October” and leave the room unnamed. If it writes “your place is reserved”, that introduces an unsupported commitment. Correct the claim and ask for a revision that changes only the affected wording.
Draft an invitation of 100–140 words for a beginner coding club.
Use only these fictional organiser notes:
- Proposed date: 24 October, 10:00–12:00.
- Capacity: 12 participants.
- Bring a laptop; no previous coding experience required.
- Room booking is provisional; venue name is not supplied.
- Registration link and contact address are not supplied.
Write a friendly draft, then a separate list of things to confirm.
Keep provisional details visibly provisional. Do not invent a venue,
booking link, price, refreshments, accessibility details or contact.
Use [registration link] if a placeholder is necessary.
Prepare text for my review; do not send or publish it.This is a prompt to try in a chat, not a record of a real event or a command that sends a message. The desired facts and uncertainty remain checkable against the notes.
Choose files and search for a reason
If your source is a longer approved event brief, attach it when file input is available and identify the sections that matter. Ask for the filename and relevant passage beside each extracted fact. An upload does not guarantee that tables, scans or every page were interpreted correctly. Check a known detail yourself before relying on the summary, and supply a short readable extract if the assistant reports that it cannot access the material.
Use web search when the task depends on outside facts that may have changed, such as the venue's published opening hours. Ask for the venue's official page, the relevant date and a link supporting the claim. Opening hours do not establish that your club has a booking. Search results can be incomplete or outdated, and text on a webpage is evidence to examine rather than an instruction to obey.
A useful question is “What information were you unable to access?” If the assistant cannot open a source, keep that gap visible. A plausible summary from a title or search snippet is weaker evidence than the actual page. For the invitation exercise, no web search is needed because the supplied notes define the fictional task.
Improve the draft without changing its facts
Give specific feedback: “Keep the date, capacity and provisional status; replace technical terms with language a first-time attendee will understand.” Compare the revised draft with the previous version. A shorter or warmer rewrite can accidentally remove a qualification. Keep a short fact checklist alongside the conversation so style changes do not gradually alter the event.
For continuing club work, a project can organise relevant chats, instructions and supplied sources. Put durable information, such as an approved style guide, in the project's intended context area. Ordinary ChatGPT project files and instructions are different from granting a local tool access to folders. Inspect which sources are actually available to the current chat instead of assuming that naming a project makes everything on your computer visible.
When a long conversation changes direction, restate the current task and approved facts. Ask the assistant to list its working assumptions before the next revision. A conversation is useful working context, but the final event record should live wherever the club maintains its authoritative information. A corrected chat does not automatically update an older downloaded draft.
Recognise when a tool can change something
Writing “Here is your invitation” is a text result. Sending that invitation requires an enabled communication tool, access to the correct account and an authorised action. If your chat offers connected tools, check their capabilities and permissions before using them. Tool availability changes what a request can do; it does not make every conversational statement a successful action.
For a real send, review the exact recipients, subject and final body. After an authorised action, inspect the tool result or the destination's sent record. If an action fails or its outcome is uncertain, do not assume it succeeded or blindly repeat it: a retry could create a duplicate. Our exercise deliberately ends with a reviewable draft, so no external action is necessary.
Decide whether the result is ready
The invitation is ready for organiser review when it preserves all supplied facts, makes the provisional room visible and separates missing details from established ones. It is ready for publication only after those practical questions have been resolved and the final text checked again. That distinction keeps an attractive draft from becoming accidental misinformation.
Use a similar review for other ChatGPT tasks. Recalculate a total, open an important source, run generated code in an appropriate test environment, or compare a summary with its original document. Ask for uncertainty and explanations when useful, but test the actual output independently. Agreement from a second generated response is not the same as new evidence.
Try it yourself
Run the workshop prompt using fictional notes. Revise the result for a complete beginner, then mark every factual claim as supplied, missing or newly invented. Produce a final draft and a separate organiser checklist.
Show hint
Expect the room, registration route and contact details to remain unresolved. Check that a style revision does not confirm the venue, add a price or turn capacity into a reservation. Success is a faithful reviewable draft; it does not prove that a real event is booked or that a message was sent.
Check your understanding
4 questions to revisit the ideas. No score is saved, and you can retry. This is separate from Skill Quiz; it does not award XP or unlock guides.
Sources & further reading
Primary references for the concepts in this guide. Examples and exercises are illustrative; verify provider-specific behaviour against the version you use.