(2023-01-30) IFTF How To Use ChatGPT For Strategic Foresight - Limitations, Possibilities, And Workarounds

IFTF: How to Use ChatGPT for Strategic Foresight: Limitations, Possibilities, and Workarounds. Over the last few weeks, we’ve witnessed impressive demonstrations of ChatGPT at work. We’ve seen it write code, do math homework, produce college essays and screenplays, answer complex questions on almost any topic

For futurists, this technological breakthrough is raising the same troubling question that’s on everyone’s mind: Can AI chatbots do my job? More specifically, is ChatGPT capable of performing my job as a strategic foresight practitioner?

1. ChatGPT can’t easily generate signals of change

2. ChatGPT tends to consider drivers in isolation

When I asked for “a list of ten good questions that futurists might ask ChatGPT,” this is what the chatbot returned

And if we choose one of the questions and pose it to ChatGPT, we get the following response.

For people who have considered this issue already, ChatGPT’s answer will seem fairly standard and predictable. It’s what I would call the consensus view, which in itself, is not unhelpful.

I would treat it first and foremost as a text generation engine and explore its utility in the following ways:

Driver analysis: Get the “consensus view” of how people are generally talking about the implications of certain drivers of change

Scenario development: Give ChatGPT the parameters of a future scenario you’ve already developed and ask it to generate descriptions of plausible futures in various forms (i.e., first drafts of titles, headlines, narratives, personas, etc.) (scenario planning)

Opportunities and threats identification: