How to use ChatGPT in your interior design business
ChatGPT is the ultimate productivity hack and it’s coming for your job, so look out.
Just jokes :)
But you will no doubt have seen all the talk about ChatGPT and how amazing it is and how we all need to learn how to use it.
The thing I’ve noticed in my discussions with designers in my community, however, is that many think ChatGPT is rubbish.
They think it doesn’t produce useful content and that the responses that it provides are boring, obvious and dry.
But ChatGPT is only as good as the prompts you give it and the questions you ask it.
If you give it boring questions or prompts then you’ll get a boring, dry response in return.
If you give it intelligent, detailed prompts, you’ll be surprised at what sorts of things it can produce for you.
In this post I want to share 5 ways that interior designers can make the most of ChatGPT to improve their workflow and get work done faster.
What is ChatGPT?
Before we get started, you may not have heard of ChatGPT, so let me just quickly explain exactly what we are talking about.
ChatGPT is a computer program that can write sentences and paragraphs like a human. It was created by OpenAI, a company that specialises in developing artificial intelligence technologies.
ChatGPT is a machine learning model that has been trained by analysing the web for examples of writing and now it can make new writing that is similar to what it learned.
It can be used in lots of different ways, such as:
answering questions
having a human-like conversation about all sorts of topics
helping you write better content - e.g. blog posts, articles, YouTube scripts or social media posts
creating FAQs for a website
writing short stories or other creative work
helping with research and analysis
producing product descriptions or specifications
writing sales scripts, emails or copy for a sales page
But, as I mentioned above, ChatGPT is only as clever as the person who is inputting the questions.
To make the most of ChatGPT you have to get good at writing prompts for it or you’ll find that what it gives you is pretty useless.
You then need to use what it gives you back as the basis for your own writing. You’ll need to take things out, add things and check the facts (as it does get things wrong).
What I think ChatGPT is good for is providing initial ideas for your work that you can then expand on further using your own knowledge and experience.
So here are 5 ways that you could use ChatGPT in your interior design business, plus some examples of the types of prompts you might give it to get the best responses.
1: Content creation (e.g. blog posts, YouTube scripts, content outlines)
One of my favourite ways of using ChatGPT is to outline ideas for my content.
In fact I used it as the starting point for this post you’re reading now!
But what ChatGPT spits out and what I eventually produce in my posts are very different. I don’t just copy and paste what it writes for me and publish it as a blog post - that would be totally boring for you as the reader and would be the same content as what most people on the web are now writing.
Instead, what I use it for is a starting point for my ideas, which I then change and update using my own experience or other ideas I’ve got. I also remove ideas that I disagree with and change the language it uses as well (because I find ChatGPT does still write a bit like a robot most of the time!).
But I think it’s a really useful tool for getting your creative ideas flowing.
Here’s an example of a prompt I gave it for a blog post you might write about how to get started with a home renovation.
You’ll notice I didn’t just ask it to “write me a blog post about how to renovate a home”. I gave it much more detail (and as a result I got a much better response).
I couldn’t fit the entire response in one screen grab from my computer - but you get the idea.
I could then take this blog post and expand on each of the sections further using my own knowledge about the topic.
2: Sales emails
Another great way to use ChatGPT is for getting it to write drafts for sales emails or scripts for emails you have to write and send regularly.
Once you’ve created the script (changing and updating what ChatGPT gives you to suit the way your write and what you want to say) you can then save these email scripts into your email provider as a template to use in the future.
This will cut down a huge amount of time in your workflow and save you from having to type the same sorts of emails over and over again.
Here’s an example of me asking it to write a sales email for someone who inquires about my design services.
3: Project Research
ChatGPT has been trained on the entire world wide web up until 2022 (as of writing this post). That means it knows a lot of stuff!
So use it to your advantage when you’re starting new design projects and want to know about the history of that era of architecture or a particular design philosophy.
Here’s an example:
4: Instagram posts
Another great use for ChatGPT is for ideas for Instagram or other social media captions.
Here’s an example:
5: Design Ideas
Finally, I played around with asking ChatGPT for some ideas for a fictional project.
This could be a good thing to try if you’re really stuck on ideas for a new project or you just want to do some initial brainstorming to check you don’t forget anything.
I thought it did a pretty decent job at outlining some of the basics for designing a family home. But if I were really using it for a project what I would do next is to get it to give more information about the different aspects of what it has already written - for example I would ask it to give me more detailed ideas for clever storage solutions for a family and see what other ideas it comes up with.
So overall I think ChatGPT is an amazing tool as long as you are creative in how you ask it things.
The better you get at writing prompts and asking questions, the better information you’ll get out of it.
Also, make sure to keep questioning it on things it writes - ask it for more detail and you’ll find that you can then get quite a lot of out of it that way. Don’t just rely on the first thing it spits out - keep asking it more and more questions until you start to uncover something more interesting.
Thanks for reading and catch you in my next post :)
Clare x
Dr Clare Le Roy
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