4.3. ChatGPT Plugins
ChatGPT plugins are extensions that enhance the functionality and performance of ChatGPT. They connect ChatGPT to external applications, enabling it to fetch real-time information, access knowledge bases, and assist with tasks like scheduling and document drafting. Plugins make ChatGPT a valuable and efficient tool for legal professionals.
You must be a ChatGPT Plus user to access Plugins. To learn how to access plugins within your OpenAI ChatGPT account reference the link here.
In this section we're going to go over a few of the most popular plugins currently available. We're especially interested in leveraging plugins that provide us with the following capabilities:
Accessing the internet to retrieve up to date information.
Engage with PDFs or Word documents for tasks such as summarizing content, extracting information, and posing questions.
Accessing external applications (ie. Email, Calendar, Case Management Platforms, etc.) to automate simple tasks
Getting Started
Let's first make sure we have Plugins enabled. Then we'll browse the available plugins we can leverage within ChatGPT. Take a look at the demo below.
Let's start using Plugins!
Example: ChatWithPDF
Being able to have ChatGPT work with PDF documents is invaluable for many. Being able to summarize large PDFs, produce answers using the contents of the PDF for any questions you pose, and more solves endless use cases for legal professionals. Before we dive into our example, we can emphasize enough the importance of understanding how services like ChatGPT and plugins process the contents of your document. If you're looking for an AI service that securely and privately handles PDF documents take a look at CaseMark AI.
WARNING: Do NOT upload PDF files that have sensitive or proprietary information. Doing so could result in data leakage and privacy violations.
Diving in: I recently read a research paper which explored the capabilities of LLMs in applying tax law. We'll have the ChatWithPDF plugin download this PDF and reference it as we ask ChatGPT questions on the research that was conducted. Take a look at our interactive demo below.
As you can see, it's fairly straightforward to start interacting with your PDFs. We can also provide multiple PDFs in the same chat session as can be seen in the screenshot below. When working with multiple PDF documents, ChatGPT will intelligently reference the related document(s) when generating a response to the prompt you provided.
Example: Connecting ChatGPT to the internet with "Web Requests"
Odds are that if you've ever used ChatGPT in any capacity you've likely come across one of its infamous responses – "As an AI language model, I have a knowledge cutoff date because my training data only goes up until September 2021."
The GPT in "ChatGPT" stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, meaning that it was trained on a massive amount of existing text data scraped from the internet. Any data made available on the internet after September 2021 was not used to train ChatGPT. Therefore, it has no knowledge of recent events, and it has no connection to the outside world. ChatGPT can NOT tell you what's the current temperature in Miami, FL.
However, ChatGPT with a plugin that has access to the internet can solve this problem. In the interactive demo below we walk you through the process of installing and using a plugin that can search the internet for ChatGPT – "Web Requests."
You've now seen how you can leverage plugins to interact with PDF documents, and search the web to gain real-time access to information. If you're asking yourself whether you can use multiple plugins at the same time you're on the right track 🙂. Our next example will demonstrate how you can have multiple plugins enabled at the same time, extending the capabilities of ChatGPT and helping you tackle more complex tasks.
Example: Using multiple Plugins simultaneously
Let's supercharge our ChatGPT workflow by using multiple plugins in the same chat session. Take a look at our interactive demo below that demonstrates how we expanded on one of our earlier examples which leveraged the ChatWithPDF plugin to extract information from a research paper. This time around we enabled the "Web Requests" plugin to give ChatGPT access to the internet. We proceeded by having ChatGPT return any amendments made to the Internal Revenue Code in 2023.
What's next?
We encourage you to explore the hundreds of available ChatGPT plugins to see which ones can help make you more productive when using ChatGPT.
In early July 2023, OpenAI announced Code Interpreter which many claim is the next evolution of plugins. We'll take a look at Code Interpreter in the next section.
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