There are two main audiences for custom GPTs built within the ChatGPT Pro insfrastucture. The first is anyone with a pro account. There are other tools that allow me to build custom GPTs with minimal skills that are open to wider audiences so I think it’ll be interesting to see whether OpenAI continue to leverage this feature to encourage new subscription purchases or whether it will open up to further stifle competitor development. In education the ‘custom bots for others’ potential is huge but, for now, I am realising how potentially valuable they might be for the audience I did not initially consider – me.

One that is already proving useful is ‘My thesis helper’ which I constructed to pull information only from my thesis (given that even the really obvious papers never materialsed I am wondering whether this might catalyse that!) It’s an opportunity to use as source material much larger documents than the copy/ paste tokens allow or even the relatively generous (and free) 100k tokens and document upload Claude AI permits. In particular, it facilitates much swifter searching within the document as well as opportunities for synthesising and summarising specific sections. Another is ‘Innovating in the Academy’ (try it yourself if you have a pro account) which uses two great sources of case studies from across King’s, collated and edited by my immediate colleagues in King’s Academy. The bot enables a more refined search as well as an opportunity to synthesise thinking.

Designed to be more outward facing is ‘Captain’s Counsel’. This I made to align with a ‘Star Trek’ extended (and undoubtedly excruciating) metaphor I’ll be using in a presentation for the forthcoming GenAI in Education conference in Ulster. Here I have uploaded some reference material but also opened it to the web. I have tried to tap into my own Star Trek enthusiasm whilst focussing on broader questions about teaching. The web-openness means it will happily respond to questions about many things under the broad scope I have identified though I have also identified some taboos. Most useful and interesting is the way it follows my instruction to address the issue with reference to Captain Kirk’s own experiences. 

Both the creation and use of customised bots enables different ways of perceiving and accessing existing information and it is in these functions broadly that LLMs and image generators as well as within customised bots are likely to establish a utility niche I think, especially for folk yet to dip their toes or whose perceptions are dominated by LLMs as free essay mills.