Early apps atop ChatGPT

Shipped with AI is back after a short break! Good thing I didn’t miss anyth— (checks notes) — (murmurs to aide) — ”passed the Turing Test you say?” — (clears throat) — well it’s very good to be back.

What a week! I’ll suppress my urge to wax philosophic and stick to what I want this newsletter to be: a celebration of AI projects and builders, no matter how small.

Theme of the week

ChatGPT portends a far greater and more immediate AI impact than many folks probably internalized. This week’s links gather the early projects (not screenshots) built atop ChatGPT as a way to sample into the space of what those changes might be.

Keep in mind there’s no official API yet — this is what you can do with a few days notice and a web scraping library.

This week’s links

ChatGPT as RPA Replacement by Sahar Mor
Automate website usage and scraping.

RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is an enormous industry hidden from consumer view. It’s the enterprise version of web scraping: automatically controlling web sites, legacy software, mainframes, and remote machines to make it seem as if they had an API to begin with.

ChatGPT as Replit Bounty Worker by Nick Arner
Author small code snippets for hire.

Replit, Fiverr, UpWork, and others maintain contractor boards that are the software equivalent of hiring an electrician to come install a new light switch. “Write a script to convert these video formats” and so on. Authoring those scripts just got a lot easier.

ChatGPT as YouTube Content Planner by 1LittleCoder
Generate an outline with timestamps for a YouTube video.

One question is how far away fully-automated video production is. 1LittleCoder shows that ChatGPT has read enough video descriptions to be able to generate a great video outline complete with timestamp marks for the hitting. This could serve as the input for script generation.

ChatGPT as SEO Post Writer by gilad
Generate ideas for SEO blog posts.. and then write them.

There’s a bit of humor in this being to ChatGPT waging a noise war on Google — filling search results with autogenerated noise sampled from the mean of the overmind. We’re going to see an immense uptick in content production of all forms soon. What I want to know: what are the non-obvious variants of this?

ChatGPT as SMS Buddy by KishanBagaria
Never leave your smart AI out of reach.

Several folks released GPT conduits into various messaging apps. What does it mean for privacy-focused Siri and set-my-timer Google Assistant when the whole works soon has an AI on speed dial? Will it force Google to rethink holding back of LAMBDA or Apple to rethink it’s no-cloud policy?

ChatGPT as Google Replacement by zohaibahmed
What keeps Sundar up at night.

This is a “picture is worth a thousand words” project if I’ve ever seen one. This Chrome extension adds ChatGPT answers to your Google search page. At left: paid ads and SEO articles. At right: the answer to your actual question.

ChatGPT as Web Browsing Companion by kazuki_sf
Chat with AI as you browse the web.

This Chrome plugin provides quick access to a GPT chat window, but I really want to see is what happens when it starts incorporating the content we’re looking at together. AI will become the ever-present consigliere that hovers over our shoulder and points out the threads we might not have seen ourselves.

That’s all for now!

Sincerely,

Totally not a bot.. or am I?