ChatGPT: 5 Practical Uses for Accountants and Bookkeepers

So what is ChatGPT? Well, it was created by a company called OpenAI. OpenAI was founded in 2015, so it's not that new. It's eight years old. It was founded by a number of really clever people and the main ones that you will probably have heard of is Sam Altman is the main guy now and Elon Musk, which you've all heard of, Elon Musk and this group of people got together to create OpenAI back in 2015. They collectively invested a billion dollars in this project.

And started building ChatGPT. Elon Musk actually left after a short time. He's not part of ChatGPT or OpenAI anymore, but he started back in 2015 initially as a non profit and then it became, then it turned into a company that's now for profit.

And they went public, they went public in November 2022. ChatGPT3 came out in November 2022. Most people had never heard of it before then because it'd been built in the background, but now it's been unleashed in the world. Now just to give you a few facts as to how big this is. When Microsoft, they decided in January of this year, January, Microsoft invested, get this, 10 million million in ChatGPT in OpenAI because they could see the potential of this. Not only that, another big stat is apparently since November 2022 it's amassed 100 million users. It is extraordinary how it's taken off. Previously the previous platform or app to get to grow so quick was TikTok. TikTok is now in second place. ChatGPT has got to 100 million users in just a few months. It's extraordinary. It got Google extremely worried. So Google ended up launching Bard just a few weeks ago. But Microsoft are really behind ChatGPT. They have.

What we thought was their platform. It's just gone bing, bing. Everyone thought it was a dinosaur, Bing. But now because it's got ChatGPT built into it, suddenly people that's got Google worried. It's extraordinary what it does. It's also a little bit scary. It's a bit scary and you may have seen just a couple of weeks ago, a bunch of people, I think it was a thousand of them, wrote an open letter, including Elon Musk, one of the founders of ChatGPT, saying that we have to have a six months pause on this because a few weeks back ChatGPT version 4 was released and even OpenAI themselves, they released a 90 odd page paper that went out with the release and they said it's doing Some things they didn't expect. And so who knows where this going. And perhaps we can get into those conversations later on if you, if you want to ask the questions about where it's going and so on. But we do want to make it as practical this session as possible. Also. There's so much we could talk about. It's a huge topic. We have been immersed for several weeks because this is huge. This is going to have a major impact on your business, on your workflow. This is something that you have to get to grips with fast because everything is going to change. Everything's going to change. It is extraordinary what it can do. And we're just at the beginning phases. It's been out just a handful of months, so perhaps you can gather that we're quite excited by it about the possibilities. So let's talk about.

I mean, if we can talk later on, there's so many things we could talk about. We could talk about the threats of AI. I mean, AI, we've heard the scary stories. And if you, if you want, we can, we can go down there and give you my thoughts on, on some of that. But let's start with the strengths. Let's start with what is so good about ChatGPT? Why do you need to be jumping on it? I can see some questions coming in, but what I'm going to do at this point, I'm going to, I'm not going to be doing the whole of this session. I do have some practical things to show you some uses of it. We'll jump into the software later, but I'm going to bring in our head of marketing, Emily, who's here. Hi there, Emily. Some of you saw Emily. She was, we did the, we did the session yesterday together on what's working right now to grow your accounting firm in 2023. And if you missed that live stream, it's on my YouTube channel. Also, Emily and I have filmed a six part series of videos for helping you with growing your firm. And we released the first one yesterday, I think Emily. Didn't we? And I think the second one goes out today. Does it?

Yep.

So if you want to learn more about marketing, then catch up with yesterday's livestream and also look out for that six part series that's been coming out, I think. Is it over the next six days, Emily?

Yes, every day this week for the next six days though the second one should be out now already.

Okay. So if you want help with growing your business and if you were with us yesterday on the live stream, you'll know. We talked a lot about content marketing and other forms of marketing that's really powerful that you should be doing. And we also, we said a few times that a great tool for one of the ways you can use it is your marketing. You can use ChatGPT to save you, make life much easier. So, Emily, let's, let's bring you in for a second. Give me what you see as being two of the big strengths of ChatGPT.

Yeah, so I mean, two of the main ways that I'm particularly using it. So it's a language model for those who don't know what it is about. It's basically really good at written stuff. It's read hundreds of millions of thousands of pages of data on the Internet since is it 2021 and it can.

Then up until 2021.

Yeah, so, so that's when it's got up to. And it can help you with all sorts of written forms of content. So whatever content that you're writing in your business, you know, websites, emails, we'll go into practical use cases in a minute. But all of these sorts of areas, it can really help you with critiquing, it can give you feedback, it can give you improved.

Improved writing using kind of SEO principles, so search engine optimized text, it can help you with those sorts of things. And it's really a useful tool, I find, for soundboarding ideas, brainstorming, getting research, you know, being a bit more specific in the research that you're getting, because sometimes you'll have to go to Google and troll through a bunch of different articles and blogs to find the answer that you need. Whereas this is a lot more specific. So that's going to be a really useful way. You know, I kind of see it as like it being a virtual assistant in a way. Like it's just your little AI assistant where you can just go to it and say, hey, I'm going to write this thing. What do you think about that? And it'll just give you some ideas and feedback. So that's a really interesting way to use it. And we'll talk about some practical actual what you can do with it in a minute as well.

Absolutely. It could become your best employee. In our case, it won't be because we have Emily and Gabby, so it's our third best employee, but it could become your best employee because I think the single biggest thing is it's going to save you huge amounts of time for certain things. Huge amounts. I mean, huge amounts of time and also save you money. Because if you want to grow your firm, you don't have to hire as many people.

Of course, there is one of the things that the threats that people keep talking about is will it replace us? And you may have seen some of the research studies that have come out that accountants and bookkeepers are near the top niche, at the top of the list of people that will be replaced. Others are copywriters, marketers, coders. There's a whole bunch of lawyers, which is. I don't mind that, but there's a whole bunch of people that will be replaced. However, I think the reality is that the people that will be replaced are the people that don't change. Your job will be taken. Not by AI. AI is just a tool. What will take your job is how your competitors are using AI. So you need to be using AI. You need to be the accountant, the bookkeeper. That's ahead of the curve on this one, because it is, as you will start to see it is extraordinary. What this can do. The strengths are. The things it could do is just amazing. But it's not all great. There are weaknesses, there are downsides, and we have to be where it's still a new technology. Yes, it was starting 2015, so that's getting on for eight years old.

But.

But it was only launched. Version three was only launched in November. And there's a number of weaknesses, things that you have to be aware of.

And for example, just something that was very current. Just I think two weeks ago, Just two weeks ago, they had quite an embarrassing bug in it, a data breach where people's chat streams were appearing in other people's feeds. And so one of the things that they said right from the start, they've always said, do not put sensitive information.

Into your conversations. Don't put sensitive information. Which, I mean, we're professionals, we should know that. Okay. But just be aware there are some weaknesses. So let's talk about some other weaknesses. Emily, give me a couple of the weaknesses that you've come across.

Yeah, so one of them is that, I mean, it's information that it uses is kind of taken from the Internet, and sometimes that information isn't actually accurate. So you might ask it a question, and it'll find something on a Wikipedia article somewhere, and it will bring you that information, and that might be false. So you do still have to do a lot of fact checking to make sure the information that you're finding is correct. Correct. And that's probably. I mean, it does bring a lot of good information. But the. The other side of that as well is that the information is, is maybe not fully recent because it, like we said, it's scoured the Internet up until 2021. So if you're trying to find something, information about something that's after that point, then that's another limitation. It's not got the information from that point and it's not connected to the Internet. Now there are extensions you can use to, to connect it in a way, but it can't, you know, you can't give it a video and say, can you go and watch this? And.

You can't give it a link and it go and find it on a web page. You have to give it the exact text that you're using. Or if it's the information after 2021, it might not be fully up to date. So those are just a couple of limitations.

Yeah. And a couple more. So Emily touched on it, something called human bias. And there's two forms of human bias that are built into the system. So let me explain when they created it, what they did, and this is the really clever bit, they studied the human brain and how the human brain works, and they wanted to mimic within software how it works. And there were two distinct parts of the programming they had to create, which is not too dissimilar to what Google did with its algorithms. But essentially part one is it had to get knowledge and understand humans input when you ask it things. And to get the knowledge, they basically scraped the Internet with huge amounts of data. And as Emily says, I think it's November 2021. It's got everything that you could find on the Internet in it up until November 2021. So it's got a huge amount of knowledge. But of course, as we know, not everything's correct. We sometimes do Google searches and what we get back isn't always quite right. Sometimes. Wikipedia is usually pretty accurate, but not always. So we have that aspect of human bias where the knowledge in the first place that it's being trained on isn't necessarily correct. And then the second aspect of it is the other part of the software, the program that I had to do was then say, okay, so when a human asks a question, I've got all this knowledge. How do I take this knowledge and give an output that's understandable to a human? And this took a long time, many, many months of training. And the way the system was trained is a whole bunch of people would be asking questions about things. The answer would come out and they'd say whether it's correct or right. Or wrong. And it would learn based on that.

And so its learning is based on the human that was saying whether it's right or wrong. It may well be some of the questions. The human would say, no, that's wrong when it was right or that's right. But actually it's wrong. It's so subject to human bias. So that does mean it's not 100% perfect. You've got to fact check, you've got to fact check everything before you use that information. But that's no different to anything else. You do Google research to get information. It doesn't mean it's right. We have to. You have to use your own experience, your professionalism to make a judgment.

But nevertheless, it's pretty good. It is pretty good. Another thing that I don't think Emily mentioned is it's text based and so it doesn't always get maths right. So there was, there's been, perhaps you've seen, there's been a few articles recently I've noticed about will it replace humans for doing tax returns? Now the answer is yes, it absolutely will. But not yet. It's not there yet, but. And various people have tested out to come up with people's tax liabilities. It's pretty good. But it's not a maths engine, it's a text engine. And so it sometimes gets the wrong answers. And so it's not there yet. It's not there yet, but it will be. So this is why we have to be ahead of the curve here, because there are some parts of what we do that we won't be doing in the future. AI will do it, so we have to be aware of the limitations, the weaknesses. There are weaknesses. But it's getting better all the time.

At a scary rate. And if you will look at it in a little while. But now it's been unleashed to the public in November and 100 million users, it's learning from the hundred million users that are using it every day. And you will notice that it gives you things like thumbs up and thumbs down so you can tell it, no, that's the wrong answer. Do a better answer. And I'm going to show you some examples in a little while about ways that.

You can be using it to refine things and get better answers. Okay. I think at this point, Emily, I'm going to go back through the and see what people have been saying and particularly questions. So I can see Michaela's here. Hi there, Mikayla. Hope you're doing well. Jonathan's been using for about a month. Great. We have. Hamza is here again. Iraj is here. We have a question. So first question is, and I don't know who you. Who you are. Apologies because you're in the Facebook group. Is ChatGPT much different practically than the new Bard by Google? Will these Suggestions today be ChatGPT specific or apply to Bard as well?

Great question. So I'm not. Bard only came out very, very recently. It's new and we haven't. I don't think. I think I'm speaking for Emily. I haven't, certainly I haven't looked into Bard yet because I love ChatGPT. I do know that when they launched Bard, apparently they did a demonstration of it and it got some things wrong. So it's got all the same limitations, but they've only just launched it. It'll get better and better and better. So, Chad, just correct me if I'm wrong, Emily. ChatGPT is, is. It's called a large language model, but one of the things it does is it has an API, so developers can use the API to connect it to their software. So it's really. It's more of a backend tool, if you like. So Microsoft have taken ChatGPT and built it into Bing. There are so many companies that are using it in the back end. Stripe use ChatGPT, Quizlet Do. So many companies are using it at the back end because the API is publicly available. Anything you want to add on that about the Bard, Emily?

No. Yeah, yeah. I mean, today's we're largely talking about ChatGPT, but the only kind of brief research I've done into Bard, because it came out recently, it just. It will give you kind of slightly different answers sometimes as well. So not to say one's better than the other, But I think ChatGPT will give you a much longer answer. It deals with a lot larger amounts of text, so you can put like a full essay in there and ask it to critique. Whereas Bard doesn't handle such big requests. You need to put one or two sentences in there and it will give you maybe a paragraph back. So there's just some slight differences in the way you might use it in that sense.

Yeah, sure. And Linda says Bard has produced some better results than ChatGPT on some prompts. And that's an interesting point because just a few weeks back they introduced ChatGPT 4 versus 3.5. And what? It's a better model, but it's not always. Sometimes 3.5 performs better than 4.0. So we're going to find this that sometimes some, some systems and some, some algorithms just work a little bit better than something else.

So that was, that was Linda. Let me just go back. Where was I? Let's do a few more questions. I can see David Delv is here. Dave, I don't understand your question, I'm afraid I've read it a couple of times. Does one have to do all the logging init requests befite it can be used? I'm sorry David, I don't. I'm not sure if you could re ask that again. I'll come back to it.

But if I just get guess at the answer. You do have to look, you do have to get an account for chit chat GPT. Let's just very quickly say you need to get an account. Perhaps I might ask Emily to type into the chat box where you go to to get it. It's basically something like open. If you know it Emily, you'll know it. You need to get an account. It's free. It's free but you can also upgrade as well and pay to have the pro account if you want to know which one to do. We'll talk about later but let's go through some more questions. I'm also conscious of time. We've got lots of stuff to cover, so Kim says. I'm wondering how original each answer is. For example, if I search to write about bookkeeping month end procedures and someone else searches the same thing, do we get identical responses? I don't know what your thoughts are, Emily. The answer is potentially. But one of the things that we're going to look at to touch on is this concept that you may have heard of that people use is garbage in, garbage out. If you want better answers, you have to you ask better questions. And so one of the really big things about ChatGPT is you have to figure out how to ask better questions. I'm going to show you some examples later that'll make that clearer. So if you ask better questions, you'll get better answers and therefore your answers, your results will be better than anybody else's. Okay, so this is called prompt engineering and it's a skill that you will need to learn. It's not difficult and we'll give you some tips today. I think. Anything you want to add on that one, Emily?

Yeah, I mean we're going to probably cover it in when we go to looking at prompt engineering but it's about distinguishing, you know, giving it more specific information. But there is also a feature so you can ask it something and then if you don't like that response, you can click regenerate and it'll have another go and it will rephrase it in a slightly different way. And always learning as well. It's always learning. So it over time it's going to give you more nuanced and better answers as well. So if you ask at a different period of time, you might get a different answer as well. But yeah, differentiation is something we'll have to look at as well.

Absolutely. Stanley asked an interesting. No, not. Sorry, not Stanley. It's Kelly. Kelly's asked an interesting question which I'm not sure I know the answer to. We've used it to run some rough drafts. Paradise for marketing. Great. But it gets facts wrong sometimes. Yes, it does. Sometimes. We've talked about that. Heard they may have a fact checker that may be released. Know anything about the fact checker? I don't. Do you, Emily? That's something we've not come across. There are. We've come across AI detectors which we might talk about another time. Now David asks an interesting question. Is there in violation of U.S. copyright law to use another's work without compensation? And again, that's, that's an interesting one. We were, we've been researching another tool which does an AI tool that creates images and it's actually got.

Who's the big company that. Getty. Getty Images are actually really worried now about this because there's an issue about if AI is creating images, they must be copyright free because it's an artificial intelligence system that's created them.

So yes, this whole issue of copyright law and there's a lot of issues here and this is partly why the likes of Elon Musk wrote this open letter and said we must put a pause on the development of ChatGPT4 and other similar things because some of these things haven't been thought through.

So we have to be aware of stuff like that.

So I think that was just Kim's comment on.

And yeah, Linda's actually made that very same point about a lot of discussion in the legal world about copyright protection.

And yes, I think that we've got things like the.

AI detectors, whether or not they're actually in practice are used or not at the moment. But you can get around the AI detectors. Okay, let's. Okay. Rami says hi to us both. Thanks, Michaela. Michaela and Rami came out to Portugal to visit us recently as part of our Portugal retreat for Value Pricing Academy members, as did a few other people Here, like, I know, Terry, you came out and so did Neil. So Connie Smith says hi there, Connie, is it considered plagiarism to use chat and pretend it's your own? My view on that is yes. So you make it your own. And we probably won't have time to go through it today, but we will do. We're doing some training to teach you how to use it better and so you can use it for all sorts of marketing, particularly like creating blog posts and stuff. And there are ways to make it your own. We haven't got time to go into that in detail now, but watch this space, Connie. It's all about things like.

Making sure the prompts. You use the right prompts to get unique content and then you can use things to get around the AI detectors and make it so it's not like anybody else's.

Let's. There's so many comments here. I thought it would be lot of comments. I probably will pause on the questions at the moment and come back to them. By the way, if you find this valuable and insightful, hit the like button wherever you are. Please keep comments coming. A couple of things I will just mention two things.

We know a lot of this is something you have to be on top of and we're all learning this. We're in the same place and so would you. My question is. It's a rhetorical question. Don't answer it. But would you like to be part of a community where, where you can learn from each other on the best ways that we in our profession can use ChatGPT? And if the answer is yes, which it must be yes, it should be yes. Then we've just set up today a brand new Facebook group to have conversations around ChatGPT. And we want to invite every one of you to the Facebook group. And so somebody, whether it's Emily or whether it's Sarah, will be putting in the various social channels right now the link to the Facebook group. It's just been set up today. You're the first people to know about it. Join the Facebook group and then we can carry on the conversations.

After the session's finished. It's going to be a group where we can all help each other and learn about how can we best use this new technology, which is extraordinary. And I promise I will show it to you soon. Don't worry, we'll get there, so do that. Also, I know that some of you here, many of you are already in one of my academies, the value price, the academy, the bookkeeper's pricing Academy or the brand new Profitable Growth Academy. And one of the things we are doing, and we've started already, is creating in depth training videos showing you step by step how to do practical things with ChatGPT. So if you're already in one of those academies, good news, you're getting some new content. And if you're not, then you might want to consider joining the Profitable Growth Academy because that's our entry level to start working with us. And at the moment, we only launched it two months ago and it's got an incredibly low founder member offer, which means you can lock in your price for life. If you're in the Value Pricing Academy, the Bookkeeper's Price Academy, you've already got access to it, so no need for you to join the profit. You've got all of this. But if you're not part of one of our academies yet, this is a great place to start. This is a great. And you can always upgrade to the Value Price Academy later at a more convenient time. But we'll put the links to the Profitable Growth Academy below. You can go to the webpage, it's got all the information you need about it. But what it doesn't say on the page is what's brand new. We've got training videos starting today and being rolled out on how to use ChatGPT to save you hours of time.

Right, let's.

Bring Emily back. Sorry. Let's talk about then a few ways that accountants and bookkeepers can use it.

I think that there are, I think there's three things that you need to be aware of. Three things that are really important when it comes to ChatGPT. Number one, we've talked about, you have to be aware of the weaknesses and understand you have to fact check things yourself and make sure it's right. Understand the weaknesses. The second thing I think is that, and I've seen this in Facebook groups where people have talked about ChatGPT. One of the overwhelming things that people say is I've looked at it and I don't know what to do with it. I played with it, but I don't really know how to use it. And that's a bit like, I mean anything that's. I remember we're big fans of Trello, we use Trello in our business. But when I first came across Trello, I had a blank board and I thought, what can I use it for? And it took me a while to start learning different things you could use it for. So what you need to do is figure out or will teach you what are the use cases? What are the different things you could possibly use it for? Because it's endless, as you're about to find out. And then the third thing you have to figure out we've touched on is prompt engineering. You have to know how to write better prompts. Better questions will give you better answers. We'll touch on that a little bit today. That's a huge topic that we'll be covering in the future. But let's look at some practical use cases. So, Emily, give a couple of ideas of how a firm of accountants or firm of bookkeepers might use ChatGPT.

Okay, so I mean, I guess just as a comment about the whole copyrighting situation is like, whose intellectual property is? One of the ways that we recommend you use it is as a starting point or to create templates rather than to write all of the content for you. And then you just take it as it is and you go ahead and use it. It's better to use it as a starting point and then you can go in and nuance it and change it and add your style or use it as a template where you can fill in blanks. So with that in mind, some of the things that you might be able to create with it from a template perspective is things like invoices, proposals, brochures and reports, things like that. Again, it's not great at maths. So if you wanting to make like a financial report and you want to input all of your numbers in there, it's not going to deal with that. But what it might help you make is a template that you can then use to kind of plug in the numbers that you go and work out in a different piece of software. So you can use it in combination with things like that. And then another great thing to do is, I mean, it's brilliant at all kinds of written content. So if you're doing content marketing and you're doing blogs and social media posts and stuff like that, you can go to it and ask it for, you know, give it something to write and then it'll go and write a blog for you. And then you can go in and you can nuance it, you change it, you can add your own tone and your own style to it. But that's one way of using it and another one, I mean, the main way that honestly that I use it is research and brainstorming. So I'm a copywriter, so for me, I kind of actually prefer writing something first and then asking it to critique it. But I'll go to it and say, can you give me 10 ideas? And an example you might use is if you are an accountant or a bookkeeper, you might say I don't really know what blogs to write. So you go to ChatGPT and say what kind of questions would let's say you work with restaurant owners, what kind of questions questions would restaurant owners ask of their bookkeeper? And it will give you however many questions. You can give me 20 examples and it'll give you 20 common questions and you can say oh that's a great one. And then you can take that one and turn that into a blog and get it to help you to turn that into a blog. So it's great for brainstorming and making lists and giving you a starting point so you know you're an element in the process. It doesn't. It's not going to just do everything for you, but it can give you some really great ideas to get you started with making content, using it to build templates for stuff as well. So lots of different areas. Yeah.

Awesome. Another one that's really powerful is it's really great for paraphrasing or summarizing. And Theresa Slack, our good friend Terry is here and she said in Value Python Academy Facebook group, we asked there what people are using for and she said something I thought was interesting. So Terry specialized in E commerce businesses and obviously there's been some new guidance from the Canadian tax authorities about dealing with Russia. So she had to give advice and basically got ChatGPT summarize the key points and given it's got all this knowledge and think about tax, for example, and how complex tax legislation is, then.

You can get summaries of information, just, you know, the highlights, the key things that you need to know. So that's a powerful use, paraphrasing and summarizing stuff that could be new legislation. But there's actually so many things that you might want to paraphrase or summarize. I'm doing that a lot. I found that I find that really powerful when I don't want to read the whole lot. I just want the key bits of information and it does that so, so quickly, so fast.

I think that we've got 24 minutes. I mean the other things that you can do, for example, in our profession we deal with Excel quite a bit and it's really good for helping you create Excel formulas. Complex stuff. I mean it's actually very good with coding, full stop. It's having an impact on developers. I was talking to our developer yesterday who wrote the effective pricing software and I said okay. So I asked him, how is your team using ChatGPT? Do you see it as a threat or not? He says their teams all over it and they're using it to help them write code. So what they'll be doing is they'll write a piece of code and then they'll put it into chat pt. ChatGPT, we're both struggling over it needs a better name and it comes up and critiques it and comes up naturally. This code will be faster. It's extraordinary what it can do. So it's great for code because that's all you text based.

And Emily touched on content marketing, creating content, which we talked about a lot yesterday. We can use it for that. I think Emily, we'll come back to some more use case in a bit, but probably time to actually just show something and then we might do a few more questions. So.

I've got loads of things I could. I play with it all the time. I've got loads of things that I could show you. I think what I might do is.

Share with you. Yeah. So let's talk about.

Hang on a second, I've been logged out. Let me just log in again.

Yep, here we go. Password. Come on, go in.

Okay. It's on a bit of a ghost at the moment with loading up my chat, so bear with me a second while that's coming. It's come, it's arrived. Just a little point on that. By the way. It's free, there's over 100 million users already. And so one of the issues is you can't always get access to it. And so we might talk about this in more detail another day. But should you upgrade or not? My suggestion is absolutely you want to upgrade because one of the biggest benefit of upgrading is is you get more consistent access to it. So I'm going to show you something in a bit because I want to. Let me just go back. So.

I said to you earlier that.

Asking the right prompts are really important and learning how to do that. And one of the things that you can do is, and should do is if you want to create a piece of content, let's say it's a marketing piece, you want it to write a blog post for you, then you want to make it, you can tell it what style of writing to use. And.

So you can tell what style of writing to use, which means that you can get it to write in the style of a famous person. So for example, there are some very well known marketers who are great at writing copy. One of the most famous is David Ogilvie. If you wanted to write a marketing piece and you want it to be worded really well, you could ask it to write it in the style of David Ogilvy and it will do that. You can also write do some fun stuff if you want to play around with it. You can get things written in the style of Daffy Duck or something and it will do that. I've done the fun silly stuff as well and played with it. But here's something that's really interesting. If you're wanting to write some content, then actually isn't it going to be really good if you could write it in your style, your style of writing. So one of the things you can do is you can train it in your style of writing. I think somebody. I'll go back to the comments again in a bit, but someone actually said I'm not showing it yet, but somebody make the point that one of the things that makes ChatGPT so much more powerful than the likes of Google is it remembers what happens before. And this is a really important point is that think of this having a conversation with somebody. I said think of it as your, perhaps your best employee. Emily used the phrase personal assistant because it will remember what. It'll remember what you said. Oops, what did I press that? Remember what you've said before and it'll build on that and it'll learn on that. So let me give you a example because you can teach it to write in your style. Let me just go to here. So I'm now in ChatGPT and I did this earlier today. I asked the question, do you know the writing style of Mark Wickersham, author of Effective Pricing for Accountants? And it said, Mark Wickersham is a chartered accountant, public speaker and author who focuses on helping accountants and bookkeepers improve their pricing strategies, etc. Etc. It went on to say.

His writing style can be characterized as clear and concise. Wickersham uses simple language and avoids jargon, making it easy for readers to understand his ideas. Practical and actionable, evidence based, engaging and persuasive, educational and informative. Overall, Mark Wickersham's writing style is straightforward, informative and focused on providing practical solutions for accounting professionals. So I thought, okay, I like that. That was quite flattering. So it knows me. Why does it know me? Because I have lots of stuff that's published, like books. It has all that information and it's able to analyze my writing style like that. The answer came back in seconds. I mean, seconds. It was probably about 10 seconds and that came out. But what if, for example, so you could do the same thing. You could ask it if does it know your writing style? And if it does, great, because you might have written some blog posts or something. It's out there. What if it doesn't? What if it has no idea who you are? So then what you could do is you could say, my next prompt is this. I am Mark Wickersham. Thank you. That's a good summary of my writing style. Please read this further example of my writing style and update your list above for any further observations you have about my writing style. So I was honored to Some of you may remember I interviewed on the live stream back in November Peter Thompson, one of my heroes, one of my mentors, and Peter just recently is just about to launch his latest book and he kindly asked me to write the forward to it. So I wrote the forward in my usual writing style. It said, here's the forward I wrote, which I then just. I just copied and pasted this in. Honest. Honored. That's what I felt when I was asked by Peter to write the forward to this extraordinary book. Let me explain. I first came across Peter in the 1990s when I was running my first business, an accounting firm. I remember subscribing to his audio newsletter, the Achiever's Edge. It was pure gold. You'll discover what that is as you read the book. Etc. Etc. I put in there a recent piece of my writing style and I said to thank you for a good summary. Please read this further example of my writing style and update your list above. So then within seconds it said, thank you for providing an example of your writing. Mark Wickersham Based on this passage, I can update and expand the characterization of your writing style with the following personal and relatable, Appreciative and humble, Enthusiastic and motivational, Conversational and friendly. In summary, your writing style is personal, relatable, appreciative, enthusiastic, conversational, and friendly. These qualities, combined with the previous mentioned characteristics of being clear, concise, practical, evidence based, and educational, create an engaging and informative experience for your readers. So I then said, I thought, well, there's a couple of things missing there. I said, please add to your list that I usually write in short sentences and short paragraphs, which you do. Those of you I teach marketing and copywriting. If you look at my forward, it's a lot of very short sentences and paragraphs. It makes things easier to read. So those of you that I teach copywriting you'll know I've taught you that keep things simple, not long paragraphs. So it says. Certainly, based on your input, I can add the following observation about your writing style. Great. I've now trained it in my writing style and you can do the same even if it can't find stuff. If you've written something great that you're proud of the style of writing, you can train it by putting it in there. So having then done that, because it remembers these things, what you can then do is let's say you're going to write a blog post or something, you can ask it to write in your style. So that's that. Let me just demonstrate. So I'm going to demonstrate two things here. I said to you earlier, another great thing is paraphrasing and summarizing. I used example of tax legislation and how Terry used it recently. But also another thing that's really good. Another thing that's great is.

It'S great for summarizing books, great for book reviews if you. I mean, I love reading. I used to love reading book business books. I've read hundreds of business books and sometimes I haven't got time to read them all. So you can ask for a book review. So I decided to do a book review of a book I was just looking at on my shelf. I've actually read it, you probably know it. It's Profit first by Mike Mikhailovich, a friend of mine. And so I thought, okay, let's do a book review. But I might decide to turn it into a blog post and I'd like it in my style. So I said, please write a 500 word book review. So be specific. How many words? Please write a 500 word book review of Profit first by Mike Mikhailovich. Write it in my style and use some quotes from the book. Please use subheadings and bullet points and format the output with markdown. I won't go into technical stuff about markdown stuff, but the more specific you are, the better the output you'll get. So look at what I've got here. Profit First, A Refreshing Perspective on Profit. Profit first by Mike Mikhailovich presents a revolutionary approach to managing business finances. The book challenges the traditional accounting form of sales minus expenses equals profit and instead suggests a new formula. And if you've read the book, you'll know I've read it and it's actually a pretty good book review and it's written in my style. So I could, if I wanted to copy and paste this and then I could perhaps add a call to action or something. I could publish that as a blog post and I spent, I think about five minutes earlier doing that.

So.

That'S the one way that you can use this system. Well, firstly, you can train. Oops, wrong thing. You can train it in your style and you can also then get it to produce content in your style. I'm going to a second example in a second, but I'm just going to bring Emily back, see if she's got one. Emily, if you want to add something about that, if you've got any other little tips about writing style or anything, any quick thoughts just to bring you back.

Yeah, I mean, the main thing I would always say is to add your ideal client of if you're writing a blog, you write an email, you're writing social media, whatever it is you're writing, you're targeting somebody with that writing. So tell it who you're targeting and make sure that it uses keywords to address that target audience, that ideal client. So if we were writing a blog, we might put, I'm writing this blog, blah, blah, for bookkeepers and accountants or small bookkeeping firms and accounting firms or whatever that might be. And that helps to tailor the language a little bit as well.

Awesome. Thank you. Yeah. Okay, I've got something else I want. I'm ready to share another practical example, but I'm conscious I should really look at the questions that are coming in and I've not. So David Dell said I'd answer his question earlier, so thank you for that.

One of the things I like about it is that you only have to reference a subject once. For example, I wanted to find out something about new order that create that great brand band. Okay. Then I asked her the secondary question without referring to a new order and got my answer. Absolutely. It remembers the chain of thoughts and you can build on it. Now, it's not perfect. It sometimes forgets some things. And so I'm going to show you. I'm going to show you an example of where it can sometimes forget things. Okay. It's not perfect. It's not the perfect employee. Which is why in our particular business, I prefer Emily and Gabby. But it's not bad. It's in third place. Okay, what else? So Jake says, great question. How do you access different versions? Is it worth trying other versions? I'm using it to help write a tax financial planning book. So today we're talking about ChatGPT. There are lots of other AI tools out there. There's another one that's got actually up to date information right up to present day with the Internet. But let's focus on ChatGPT, because that's where we are. And the great thing is it's free. But I do recommend that you upgrade, partly because the free version only has 3.5. And if you upgrade to the Pro, which is only something like $20 plus tax per month, which I think is crazy low, when you can, if you get into the habit of using it regularly like we do, this can quite easily save you one or two hours every single week. Every month it could save you 10 hours. Well, if you value your time, 20. $20 a month plus tax is just, I think, crazy cheap. I would definitely pay for it because then you can use ChatGPT4. ChatGPT4 is better, but it's a bit slower. So experiment. There's pros and cons of both, but it opens up different options. It also gives you, when you pay, other bits of functionality as well.

Lynn says Dall e for images. Yes, We've been exploring that. That's an interesting tool. Got some weaknesses we found, but it is pretty good.

Terry likes the new Facebook group. So if you missed, we put a link in earlier, I think. No, we haven't. It's here. Yes. There's a link to join the new Facebook group where we're going to Discuss all things ChatGPT and AI and help you get the best out of it. And I think quite a lot of you have said yes to the community. Yes. It's not sunny. I know that now. I think it's Tracy, isn't it? Neil's joined. Loads of people just said, join the Facebook group.

Jake says, I saw a demonstration of ChatGPT where they ran the text through another program to test for plagiarism, and it showed very low percentages. I guess you mean a bad score. Yes. And so you can fix it. There are ways to fix it. We'll talk about that another day.

Carlos is first time. Oh, welcome to my live stream, Carlos.

Yes. These live streams are my. Go to my YouTube channel, Carlos, and you'll see, for example, yesterday's livestream. You can find it in Facebook. Just easy to go to my YouTube channel to watch our previous live streams. Okay. Lots of people saying they've joined the Facebook group. Question.

James Brown, David. David says this is a good question. If the database ends in November 21, how does it address tax law changes after that date? I guess it doesn't unless people are training it. Okay. People are using it and it's training all the time. But it's A limitation. You have to be aware if you want to use it for current stuff. Just be careful.

People should not be using it right now to do their tax returns. Okay. Some people will start using it for that, but it will get things wrong. That's where you come in with your expertise.

Another example here from Terry. Her and Connie used it to rewrite an email, write a template email that we send out to our clients each month. That's a great use of it as well, helping you with emails. I think I've answered Kimber's question about the pricing. Okay, so many comments.

Okay, let me move on to if. What should we move on to? I might do another example. If that's it. Emily, have you got any points before I go to another example?

Then we can go to examples.

Okay, great. Let's do another example. So let's think. So I mentioned to you that you want to. You can get it to use your style or anybody else's writing style. Here's another thing you might want to do.

You might want to train it about your business. Because if you want to create, for example, an offer, a sales page, a social post or something to promote your service, then you can train it in your business. Now, it may well be that your business has been around since before November 2021 and you therefore might not need to train it. And we'll talk about that in a second. But let's just imagine, and it might not be your business, it might be you've launched something fairly new and you would like it to create some marketing for you or some social posts or something and you needed to know something about your business. Let me share with you something did earlier. So I went and started a new chat and I said, can I tell you about my business so you can use this information to create sales copy and social media posts? He said, as an AI language model, I said, yes, I can certainly help you. Actually, a simple yes would have done, but it came up with a couple of paragraphs. So what I did is I went, we launched back in February the Profitable Growth Academy. And I went and grabbed off our website, the text and I then posted the text of our website into ChatGPT. So I'm not going to go through all this. You can go to the website and find it.

And.

Yeah, let me just go through here. So there's a lot of text in the website, you can see. So I fed it all this information about our business and so it's come up with this short summary. It says the Profitable Growth Academy is an online resource designed to help accounting and bookkeeping professionals build a successful, profitable firm. The Academy is founded on four essential foundations for building a great accounting firm. Clarity, pricing, growth and systems and so on. It goes on. It created these four great paragraphs which is a great summary of the Profitable Growth Academy. So then I went and said great. Please write a 200 word social media post about the key features and benefits of the Profitable Growth Academy. The Target Audience As Emily said earlier, the target audience is accountants and bookkeepers. Write it in the style of Mark Wickersham and include bullet points for the key features and benefits. So here we go. Hey there fellow, I didn't like that bit. Are you struggling to build a profitable firm and feeling overwhelmed by all the things you need to do, et cetera, et cetera? Led by Amazon number one bestselling author Mark Wickersham, the Profitable Growth Academy provides a step by step roadmap and and plan to build successful accounting or bookkeeping business with monthly live training sessions led by expert Jessica Fox and core training etc etc. Here are some of the key features and benefits you get Core Training a Monthly live training sessions with Jessica, Supportive community, ready to use resources etc Etc don't let the challenges and frustrations of running a firm hold you back any longer. I thought that was pretty good, so I've trained it in my business. But then I thought okay, going back to this point that it doesn't always give you the answers the style that you want. It's not. We can correct it like having a conversation with an employee. So I then said please replace the first line because I didn't like the first line. The first line said hey there fellow accountants and bookkeepers. So I said please replace the first line with an attention grabbing headline and reword the final paragraph with a CTA that references they can save over 50% by being a founder member and when they join they lock in their price. Which is true by the way, if you do join today. So it then says it redoes that as headline Struggling to build a Profitable Accounting Firm. Join the Profitable Growth Academy and Master the essentials. And then it says it's got the bit about you can save over 50% and lock in the price, etc. But there's a problem with that. It's done an okay job. But I said in the previous one I want it to be 200 words and I want bullet points for the features and benefits. So it didn't quite give me what I wanted. So I then said that's okay, but I still want it to be 200 words and I want you to use bullet points for the main features and benefits. So it then goes again. Headline. Great, it's got the headline now. It's gone back to really what the first version was with the bullet points, but it's now added in the call to action. You can save over 50% and lock in your price. And so the point I'm making is it's like you have to treat it like having a conversation with an employee. Not everything is. They don't give you everything exactly as you want. So you correct it. You just go back and you reiterate. And sometimes it usually remembers. It usually remembers the thread, but sometimes it forgets things. Okay, you have to remind it. No, I actually wanted 200 words. Please go back and rewrite it with the 200 words. Okay, we've got three minutes. So much I wanted to show so much. So let me ask a question.

If you found this valuable, give it the thumbs up and perhaps put a comment if it's been valuable. Because if this, if it's, if, if it's solving a need, if this is helping you, us teaching you how to use it, practical examples and stuff, we can do more of these sessions. Do you want to Learn more about ChatGPT? Let us know if we get lots of thumbs up and lots of comments. We will do more of this. In fact, we've provisionally planned April 20th. Emily, when is it? April 20th.

20Th. Yeah, I think it's a Thursday, Thursday.

April 20th we are thinking of because I'm about to go on vacation for 10 days, so. But when I get back, April 20th, same time, we're probably going to do another live stream if your feedback says you want that. And let us know if there's certain things you want us to cover because we will do our best to help you however we can. Neil says the book review is cool. I love that. I've been using it quite a bit and.

They are usually pretty good.

So. Sarah Bridges I just had it learn my style from reading my webpage. That's cool. Lynn says if it remembers what it did for you, will it share the same information content with others? Well, this is why I said to you, one of the things you got to be careful of, it does say don't put personal data in there or sensitive data. But I think the way it's, I think what it will do is yes, it's use.

It'S letting the users use it to train it. So we're kind of the trainers now, and yes, I think it will. I think it will. Now, if somebody else was to say, please write in Mark Wickersham style, it probably will refine it based on what I've told it. It will write in short sentences and short paragraphs. So I think the answer is yes. So be aware of that. Just be aware that it's learning from us and that's why you've got to be careful what you use it for. Mindy says, could we have a link to the place to sign up for ChatGPT, please? We might have done that. I don't know. Further down or not. I can't remember. Let me see if we get to that, Mindy. We'll certainly put it in the description underneath. Do you know it, Emily, off the top of your head?

I think it's OpenAI.com forward/chat.

I think chat GPT or chat in.

OpenAI, that will be the first thing that comes up. And then It'll say, try ChatGPT on there.

Yeah. If you can't find it, we'll probably. We can. We'll put in the description.

Peter Slack that. Yes, there's many integrated tools worth looking at from Microsoft. Microsoft's going to build in all sorts of stuff. We're going to see big changes to things like Excel, which would be amazing. Still lots of people saying, all right, so Terry's happy because it knows her writing style.

What else? I'm conscious that we've kind of run out of time. Normally I stop on 60 Minutes. Emily, do you need to go? Because I'm quite happy just to wrap up and just answer a few questions, if you're happy to stay. I'm just going through. There's so much stuff in comments from people.

What does Jake say? Let me just. I think it was a clarity when I asked how to access different versions. I mean, of ChatGPT, you have been talking about versions 3.5 and 4. How do you get to the different versions and is it worth the time? So let's go. Let me just show you on that. If I go to demo, if I start a brand new chat.

It says at the top the model you want to use and you've either got ChatGPT 3.5, the old 3.5 and 4. You only get that if you are a plus user, if you subscribe, if you don't subscribe, if you have the free one, you're on 3.5. If you upgrade, which we all have, because it's so powerful, then every single model, it always defaults for some reason to 3.5, but you can choose and tell it and it tells you the benefits of each one. So the reasoning is much better with ChatGPT4. The reasoning, the logic, but it's slower because of that. If you want something fast, then 3.5 is faster. So you get to choose if you're a plus user. I hope that Jake answered the question.

Michaela says it's scary. It is. And I know you mentioned a comment recently, Michaela, about Skynet. It is actually seriously scary, but I kind of view that Pandora's box has been opened and I think what we need to do is use it as a tool to benefit our business. There are some scary things. That's a conversation for another day.

So somebody says, I'd like to learn more, but I would love a cheat sheet or an organized slide with some top tips for improving your query. Well, one of the things we are doing, and we've started already, we are building videos, step by step videos and there will be workbooks and stuff that we'll be making available to members of the academies. So if you're not met yet a member, check out the Profitable Growth Academy. There's already. We put three videos up there today.

Katrina says, great session. More please. Lyn wants to learn more. Sarah wants more. Okay, I guess.

And Terry, she loves the practical examples. Yes, we're going to keep giving you practical examples because that I think is one of the hardest things. Well, what can I use it for? There are so many possibilities.

I think we probably. There's lots of great comments. I don't think there's any questions that I know it was Jeff's got a question.

I'm going to show some of the other comments as we, as we close out with the music. Jeff said, is there a means for you to see the sources of the information that ChatGPT provides you? I don't think so. Emily, any thoughts on that one?

I don't know off the top of my head, but what you might be able to do is just ask it and say, can you provide me with the source for that? So ask it and then say, okay, what was the source for that? And it might tell you.

Sarah has put the link in there. It's chat.openeye.com that was it. We were close, Emily. We were close, but we were wrong. So there you go. That's where you go to register your account.

Erin says, where can I find the new ChatGPT Facebook group link? We did post it earlier, but perhaps if knowing service, you've probably already done this. You'll probably find the link reposted again.

So yes, do join the Facebook group and then once you're in it. We only started today, but we will be. We'll have to make sure, Emily, that we're all in it and then we can answer more questions and so on. And Erin says, how do I join the profitable growth academy again? We'll put the link if we haven't already. It'll be in the chat somewhere here, look for the link and we will put it in the description. It may well be. Sarah's seen that and done it somewhere. I can see that. The links coming back in for the Facebook group. There you go. That's the link to the Facebook group. I think Sarah's just in the. It takes a while because we have to put it in all different platforms. Some of you on LinkedIn, some on YouTube and so on. Okay. Lots of great comments, Emily. Thank you for your contributions. So we will do a follow up session to this because it seems to me that you want it. So we will do that. We'll come up with some more practical use cases. I had more I want to show you today. I had a couple of things that will just blow you away but we ran out of time. So we'll get to those next time. Don't worry. So that's April 20th and yeah, that's the next time we'll be live, I think, Emily, there's nothing before then. So April 20th we will do that. If you. Erin, the link's also in there for the proper growth academy. So go and check that out and I'm going to play with some music as I always do. Give me a chance to read your comments. Thank you for all your great comments. Thanks for. Thanks for the questions and I'm going to go quiet for a bit because Sarah and I go on vacation from Friday for just over a week and we'll see you when I get back. Okay, take care. Bye for now.

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