ChatGPT Is the Best Journal I’ve Ever Used

Hey! Dan here. I’m at a conference this week, so no new column from me. 

About 10 months ago, I wrote a piece called “GPT-3 Is the Best Journal I’ve Ever Used.” What strikes me most about this piece is how relevant it still is—everything is the same, except it’s all much better. For one, when I started journaling, ChatGPT didn’t exist and I had to write in the OpenAI Playground, which wasn’t even built for chat. For another, GPT-4 is significantly smarter than GPT-3: GPT-4 boasts 100 trillion parameters whereas GPT-3 only had 170 billion—making it less repetitive, more factual, and better at reasoning. GPT-4 boasts a significantly larger context window—8k vs. 4k tokens—so you can pass much more information to it for discussion. Finally, it's multi-modal, so it can generate images based on your journal entries—which I find to be delightful and helpful.  

I’m still frequently using ChatGPT as a coach, expert, and mentor for decisions or problems in my life. It’s helping me in ways big and small—encouraging me to focus on being more strategic rather than tactical and helping me to become less agreeable.

I’ll write a full update on this soon, but if you’re the least bit curious, I encourage you to try some of the prompts I mention below. It could change your life—it’s definitely changed mine.

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For the past few weeks, I’ve been using GPT-3 to help me with personal development. I wanted to see if it could help me understand issues in my life better, pull out patterns in my thinking, help me bring more gratitude into my life, and clarify my values.

I’ve been journaling for 10 years, and I can attest that using AI is journaling on steroids. 

To understand what it’s like, think of a continuum plotting levels of support you might get from different interactions:

Talking to GPT-3 has a lot of the same benefits of journaling: it creates a written record, it never gets tired of listening to you talk, and it’s available day or night. 

If you know how to use it correctly and you want to use it for this purpose, GPT-3 is pretty close, in a lot of ways, to being at the level of an empathic friend:

If you know how to use it right, you can even push it toward some of the support you’d get from a coach or therapist. It’s not a replacement for those things, but given its rate of improvement, I could see it being a highly effective adjunct to them over the next few years. 

People who have been using language models for much longer than I have seem to agree:

(Nick is a researcher at OpenAI. He’s also into meditation and is generally a great follow on Twitter.)

It sounds wild and weird, but I think language models can have a productive, supportive role in any personal development practice. Here’s why I think it works.

Why chatbots are great for journaling

Journaling is already an effective personal development practice. 

It can help you get your thoughts out of your head, rendering them less scary. It shows you patterns in your thinking, which increases your self-awareness and makes it easier for you to change.

It creates a record of your journey through life, which can tell you who you are at crucial moments. It can help you create a new narrative or storyline for life events so that you can make meaning out of them.

It can also guide your focus toward emotional states like gratitude, or directions you want your life to go in, rather than letting you get swept up in whatever is currently going on in your life. 

But journaling has a few problems. For one, it’s sometimes hard to sit down and do it. It can be difficult to stare at a blank page and know what to write. For another, sometimes it feels a little silly—is summarizing my day really worth something?