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Everyday ChatGPT

What it is and what it's for

For most humanities users, "ChatGPT" mainly means the ordinary chat interface. That is still the centre of gravity. In a normal chat you can ask questions, upload files, draft or revise writing, analyse passages, brainstorm teaching materials, work through translations, summarise readings, and ask for help understanding unfamiliar concepts. ChatGPT can also search the web, talk about images, generate images, and respond by voice on supported platforms.

In humanities work, ordinary chat is often enough for:

  • Close-reading support and first-pass summaries
  • Rewriting for different audiences
  • Seminar preparation
  • Tentative translation checking
  • Generating discussion questions
  • Producing structured notes from messy material
  • Getting unstuck when a project has stalled

It is also often the safest place to begin, because it lets you experiment without first setting up a whole system.

Limits and cautions

Ordinary chat has obvious limits. It can sound more confident than it should. It may invent references, flatten nuance, mishandle chronology, or over-regularise messy evidence. It is best treated as a fast and suggestive assistant, not as an authority. Web search can help with current information because it returns links to sources, but those sources still need human checking.

Leif's Notes

Treat ChatGPT as a fast, suggestive assistant — never as an authority. It will hallucinate references, flatten nuance, and sound confident when it shouldn't. Always verify factual claims before reusing them in teaching or publication. See Verification & Citation for a systematic approach.

Settings that matter

Custom Instructions let you set durable preferences about how ChatGPT should respond. OpenAI says they apply across chats and are available on all plans. For example, you might specify your discipline, preferred citation style, and language register.

Temporary Chat gives you a blank slate: no memory, no use of past chats, and no lasting history for that conversation. For sensitive, provisional, or compartmentalised work, Temporary Chat is often the better option.

A sensible default

Use ordinary chat for one bounded task at a time. Upload the relevant source material where possible. Ask for explicit uncertainty when claims are weak. Verify anything factual before reusing it in teaching or publication.

Minimum safe practice

  1. Use Chat for one bounded task at a time.
  2. Upload the source text you want to work with.
  3. Ask for critique, summary, or analysis — not for authoritative facts.
  4. Verify all references against a library catalogue.
  5. Do not upload sensitive, personal, or embargoed material.
  6. Record what you asked and what you used from the response.

For data handling considerations that apply across all platforms, see Data Governance.