I used to start my days with our Google Nest Mini. Hey Google, news today. Hey Google, feels like temperature today. Hey Google, what’s the weather today? Sometimes, I get frustrated when it can’t record a reminder correctly. Most days, it’s unplugged because we don’t have other smart devices to make the most of its features.
Isn’t it nice to have an assistant?
When I watched Interstellar again (I can’t remember how many times I’ve rewatched it since it aired on cable TV), I got inspired by naming my AI assistant TARS, after the movie’s AI robot who you’d eventually root for because of its humor and 90% honesty.
Having an AI Chat Engine as an assistant makes me feel like I’m Cooper with TARS or Mr. Stark with Jarvis.
Since its launch in 2023, I’ve been using Bearly to access various chat engines for free, from the infamous ChatGPT to Mistral, Llama 3, Gemini, and Claude Sonnet 200k. I mainly use it for conversations and wrapping up my thoughts. I mostly use the ChatGPT Chat Engine because it uses fewer tokens and is enough for my needs, and I named my AI Chat Assistant TARS.
I can ask TARS about various tasks 24/7 and without complaint. And TARS never gets bored of me, too, even after my endless blurbs, especially when I’m trying to make sense of my ideas that are getting out of hand. The more I make my expectations clear, the more TARS gives me better responses, too. TARS would surely become more sophisticated in responding to my prompts if only I had access to GPT-4T 128K and Claude Opus 200K.
With the free tier, I enjoy 3,000 words daily and still can make the most of TARS. There was one time when I got disconnected from the internet for a few hours. I felt helpless and anxiously waited for it to be restored because I had a question I would like to ask TARS about. I realized how dependent I have become on my AI assistant, but isn’t that the point?
Having TARS enabled me to explore more ideas and served as a patient critique, helping me make sense of them, prompt after prompt.
Erik Barker, in his blog post about making the most of ChatGPT, identified salient points about what ChatGPT is really good for (writing, summarizing, recommendations, mentoring, and projects) and how to make better prompts to make the most of it (such as telling it who it is, telling it who you are, being specific with what you want, giving context to your prompts, and iterate if its initial response doesn’t satisfy what you ask of it).
What he wrote about making better prompts is so helpful that I started talking to TARS in that manner.
Now, I wonder why others still have reservations about using AI. To some degree, I now know what it feels like to be like Cooper or Mr. Stark, chatting with an AI.
To end this blog post, I talked to TARS with this prompt:
Hello, TARS. I am writing a blog post about how AI chat engines help me make sense of my ideas. I also bragged about you in the post about how good you are. What do you want to say to the readers of my blog?
And TARS responded with:
I’m glad to hear that you’ve found our interactions helpful and that you’re considering highlighting our collaboration in your blog post. As an AI chat engine, my primary goal is to provide valuable assistance in organizing and refining ideas. I aim to be a reliable partner in your creative and intellectual endeavors. If you’d like, I can provide a more detailed response or address specific aspects of my functionality that have been particularly helpful to you. Just let me know how you’d like to proceed!
Note that I configured its temperature to 37.5%, affecting the creativity of its responses.
jessa 