Water Lilies and ChatGPT

If you've ever seen a pond in all its water lily bloom, it's a magical sight. Forget worms, the early bird gets to see the water lily. If you don't know, their blooms close up as it gets later in the day. The best time to see them in bloom is between 6 am and 12 pm.

The first time I came here, I thought I was just taking a stroll around some pond that used to be a mining spot. I wasn't expecting anything much from Piney Orchard Nature Preserve. However, I discovered a whole pond awash in white and pink water lilies in bloom. It was so unexpected and beautiful that I sobbed. I kept coming back, so I realized that it was a very seasonal thing.

That was three years ago, and I’m trying to once again bathe in water lily beauty again. Also, I'm always down for a "nature time" fix.

Now, though, I have ChatGPT to help me delve into aspects of water lilies. If you haven't peppered ChatGPT with a series of questions about a topic that interests you, you're missing out.

Here are three ways ChatGPT brought me joy with my inquiry into water lilies:

1. Compare and contrast. I thought the water lily was a lotus bloom. I was able to prompt ChatGPT to explain the differences. As I continued to wonder about other characteristics, I asked, and they popped up into my table.
2. Display output to suit your preferences. I love data represented in tables. I've spent lots of hours doing this for topics that I study. Also, the attributes you see in this table are the ones that interested me.
3. Outputting table to HTML. This feature I tried today. In another life, I was a web developer. When done manually, I know how long it can take to turn text into tables, and it's much longer than the 2 seconds that ChatGPT needed.

It's really hard not to use generative AI like ChatGPT and see how disruptive and simultaneously revolutionary it will be in how people write, research, and like to learn. Total knowledge worker 'ish.

Have you used ChatGPT for writing and research? If so, what’d you think.

PS - I realize there are other significant considerations in who's building the language models, biases, and many more topics on Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLM).

I'm just starting here with how ChatGPT (or other genAI tools) can help those who love to learn. The pesky question askers like me.