Interactive Journal

Happiness might remain elusive, but have you tried… a product? Your phone doesn’t seem to give you peace, but have you tried a cold plunge? Turmeric colonic? Eliminating carbs? Frankly, I’d rather take the colonic, but you do you. 

The fact of the matter is, mileage varies for all the self-help activities, but there does exist a pretty tight 6 that rise above the rest (and obnoxiously, none of them are things you can buy). They’re very boring and difficult to put on your social media profile, so most of us don’t do them because what’s the point? In no particular order the 6 Bit Things are:

• Sleep 8ish hours per night 
• Move your body
• Eat some plants
• Make a face-to-face social connection with another human
• Spend some time in nature
• Participate in some manner of reflective activity (mediation/yoga/journaling)

It’s this last one we’ll be using ChatGPT for today, with the focus being on journaling. 

Journaling is a high reward/low cost activity that often goes unexplored. It requires next to zero investment other than time, ink (or digital bits), and it can be done anywhere. So why don’t more people do it? 

One common issue is the dread of the blank page. People might feel unmotivated to come up with something to journal about, they could be uncomfortable with personal reflection, or they may view themselves as lacking the necessary creativity. 

You don’t need ChatGPT to start journaling, but it can launch you over those annoying roadblocks. Think of it as your friendly, digital sounding board.

BUILDING AN INTERACTIVE JOURNAL

You can jump straight into ChatGPT and begin journaling if you’d like, but journaling is a fiercely independent activity. What works great for me might be horrifyingly dull or invasive for you. With any personal endeavour you must find your particular goldilocks zone of comfort with it. 

Maybe you don’t want your journal to respond back to you, but you’re dreadful at getting that first sentence down? In such a case, you might prefer it be little more than a prompt engine , ready to ask you a helpful question to get you started. 

Perhaps you’re well aware of what you want to write, but you’d love a second opinion on some thoughts and feelings? While AI obviously lacks that human touch, how many times have you confided in a friend and they responded so poorly that you wish you never said anything at all? Sometimes the human touch isn’t all its cracked up to be.

BEFORE WE BEGIN…

We should state a couple caveats: while we’re not using this as a therapy bot, ChatGPT is not a licensed therapist and there should be no assumption of 100% privacy. If it suggests you to sell all your shit and run away to Mexico and you do it, that’s kinda on you.

AI therapists

There’s an entire subculture of people that are using chat bots for therapy, which can be exciting and dangerous in equal measure. We exist in a fascinating time where studies are showing that AI is capable of delivering certain things (such as medical advice) at levels that meet or even exceed that of humans. That said, it’s so early, certain cautions must be employed. 

There is nuance to our experiences and problems. For example, if Susan at work keeps stealing a bite of your sandwich from the office fridge, ChatGPT might offer some outstanding advice, and even if it misses the mark a bit, Susan had it coming. If you are experiencing anxiety due to a horrific childhood trauma, bad advice can be incredibly harmful and set your recovery back. These two issues are wildly different, and using ChatGPT might work great for one, but a disaster for the other.

Privacy

While there’s no obvious proof OpenAI is gathering data on us to do anything nefarious, it is a common practice in tech to not load anything overly sensitive or proprietary into it. This is more commonly seen in people giving it code problems to help with when their employer reallydoesn’t want their code getting out into the world. 

There are others who are highly concerned with giving the AI too much of a look into our own workings. We live in a time when the tradeoff of convenience or experience for privacy is a personal decision. Will we come to rue the day we traded free email and maps from Google in exchange for all our information? That will likely be a personal decision. We must all find our own comfort levels. 

For those curious, you can delete chats from the sidebar of ChatGPT by clicking the three dots next to them, but of course for others that might not be enough assurance that it isn’t collecting all that information. 

BUILDING AN INTERACTIVE JOURNAL

My personal opinion is I’ve already given enough information to Google and Apple over the last 20 years. So screw it, I’m not overly concerned, let’s do this. If it ends up killing me, I guess I’ll have something pretty wild to journal about. 

What I want for my interactive journal is as follows:

• A prompting engine for those days I don’t have anything to talk about, and it should cater the prompts to what emotion I may be feeling at the time, such as stress, excitement, sadness, etc.
• A selective sound board that will respond to questions I give it, but only if I ask for it (sometimes I just want to write for me)
• Assist with goal-setting, breaking them down into actionable steps, and providing ways to track progress.
• Provide text-to-speech options for those days I want to “journal” while out for a walk (bonus: this will cover people who feel more comfortable speaking aloud in general or have physical issues with typing/writing)
• Allow for vision capabilities so people can write on paper and upload images (Some people find physically writing with a pen is part of the experience)

We can also focus on a particular style that we want to be interacted with. Perhaps we want a kind, gentle fairy godmother persona to tell us it’s going to be alright. Perhaps we want more of a drill instructor to bring the heat when we need a kick in the ass. By default, ChatGPT definitely leans towards the former, but you can tweak it to your personal preferences. 

INSTRUCTIONS

TESTING IT OUT

The GPT did a fantastic job of walking me through a potential scenario. I wrote about 5 paragraphs on a work issue I was having, and it did a remarkable job of breaking it down and asking some great questions. 

One thing I quite enjoyed was adding a section to the instructions on what kind of thinkers/authors I like. This helped it tune any advice given to those types of people. When I ran the experiment again, replacing the thinkers/authors with people with differing styles, the advice did adjust (albeit not as aggressively as I was hoping). 

ChatGPT is by default pretty gentle. Some find this annoying–they want it to be harsh if asked, but instead it’s usually quite amicable. I was able to get the response I wanted with minimal prodding, but hopefully in time we can get it to stick to the instructions a bit more. 

ALTERNATE USES

This GPT focuses on enhancing personal development and self-reflection through the use of an interactive journal, leveraging ChatGPT’s capabilities to facilitate journaling, provide emotional support, and offer personalized advice. These skills could also be leveraged to create GPTs such as:

Creative Writing Assistant

For those facing writer’s block or seeking to enhance their creative writing skills, this GPT could provide prompts, plot ideas, character development advice, and constructive feedback on written pieces. It could also help writers explore different perspectives by way of asking questions to deepen their storytelling abilities.

Office Politics Advisor

For those uncomfortable with inter-office politicking, this GPT could help users navigate their career paths by providing personalized advice for professional development and situational breakdowns to better handle obstacles in the workplace. It could also suggest networking strategies and track the user’s progress towards their career goals.

Emotional Management for Kids

The world can be a confusing place for children, so offering them a way to validate their experiences and ask questions instead of dictating what to do could be a useful tool in fostering a self-examined life from an early age.