Rhys Morgan is a Library Assistant at Ward End Library after a variety of work, including Anglican parish Priest and call centre agent. The article is featured on the CILIP AI Hub

I’ve just moved to a new library branch, I’ve changed my hours, I remember saying in the interview a few weeks previously that I had some ideas on how to get greater engagement.

My supervisor has put me down for the story reading rota but I’m keen, being in the honeymoon stage of my new role, I tell my supervisor “Sure what about a chess club during the summer holidays?”

“Great” she says.

We procure chess sets - borrowed or ordered, promotional videos are posted on Facebook and TikTok – they get fewer views than the videos for the crochet club but likes aren’t the be all or end all.

They don’t feature in the annual appraisal document so cometh day one – cue dramatic music an attractive display of chess books for children.

Then, two boxes arrive from amazon with chess printed on the boxes! They only contain draught pieces!

Don’t panic as corporal Jones said many times. You can use those if people arrive who don’t play chess!

Some of the 14 children arrive and get stuck in.

The rest are unsure of the rules or aims even. I show them the books – not very interested – I haven’t got time or really the aptitude to teach a game I’ve hardly played since I attended a school chess club run by my father in the last century!

Don’t panic Rhys Don’t panic. Chat GPT

In my spare time and a side project I dabble in I’m aware of some of the strengths and weaknesses of ChatGPT so I logged on.

ChatGPT is a natural language processing tool driven by AI technology that allows you to have human-like conversations and much more with the chatbot. The language model can answer questions and assist you with tasks, such as composing emails, essays, and code.

Generative AI models of this type are trained on vast amounts of information from the internet, including websites, books, news articles, and more, and was fine-tuned using supervised learning as well as reinforcement learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) which is what makes ChatGPT unique.

This means that getting the correct prompts or commands to generate the right kind of text is part of the process of using ChatGPT properly.

As with all ChatGPT’s answers I needed to check for facts or veracity, but as long as I’m careful with the prompt, it shouldn’t be too challenging to produce something usable.

So the prompt I used was “Explain the basics of chess to an eight year old”

See below for yourself if ChatGPT got it right:

Despite my efforts on ChatGPT, the children who knew how to play ignored the printout as did the parents of those who couldn’t play.

As far as I was concerned, I felt I’d provided a concise, easy to read introduction to chess without spending much time editing and condensing blog posts and book chapters into 1 side of A4 which is what ChatGPT did!

Will it take my job in Ward End? No (a cash - strapped council is my biggest fear)

Do AI applications like ChatGPT help me?

Definitely, but only if I ask it carefully structured questions so it can give helpful structure answers.

Download the PPT of the chess rules (with images)