If you’ve been following technology news recently, you know there’s been a lot of hype around Microsoft’s OpenAI platform and ChatGPT. Trust us when we say that the hype is warranted. While artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t new technology, Microsoft’s application of it through ChatGPT is groundbreaking, with its ability to generate fresh content from simple prompts and questions.
While there are infinite opportunities across industries and in people’s personal lives to take advantage of this new AI capability, we asked: How could ChatGPT increase capacity of impact teams by saving them time?
Read on to find the answer! In this b.world release, we hope to wow you as we unveil the world's first ChatGPT-powered program design, impact measurement, and storytelling features that will dramatically increase your ability to do more good. And better yet, you'll be able to do it without compromising mission authenticity, project efficacy, or the wellbeing and safety of project participants.
Project Creation
With this release, b.world's project creation functionality taps into ChatGPT to auto-generate a draft project name, summary, challenge statement and proposed solution. This "Draft with AI" option is available alongside the existing manual project creation option on the Projects page. All you have to do is paste a block of meaningful text—from your website, a proposal, a grant agreement, or any other source—into b.world's project creation wizard, and the app will take care of the rest for you!
(Note that you can edit the auto-generated content once it’s been created.)
Story Creation
Also powered by ChatGPT, b.world can now auto-generate draft impact stories that you can edit and publish. Impact storytelling has never been more efficient!
b.world offers several different options with respect to AI-generated story content:
"Draft a Story with AI" button
There is now a persistent button in the header for each project labelled “Draft a Story with AI.” Clicking this button will automatically generate a story (using the “Purpose Story” template), pulling from content that exists in the project including the title and summary, challenge statement, proposed solution, the logframe and data, etc.
New story based on template
Just like before this release, you can still create a story by selecting from one of 6 story templates. Now, you have the option to auto-generate draft content for a story simply by toggling on the “Draft a Story with AI” switch, which sits above the story templates. Using this feature will also auto-generate a draft title for the story. Note that the only story template for which this function doesn’t work is “Create Your Own Story.”
Prompt-specific paragraphs
You can also choose to use the auto-generation on a section-by-section basis inside a story. Rather than choosing to auto-generate the whole story—as discussed in the paragraph above—you can select a story template without turning the “AI function” on but can then take advantage of this function once the blank story template has been generated. The quality of the story answers is no different; it’s just a matter of personal preference. This function also works for the “Create Your Own Story”; all you have to do is enter a prompt or question that you want ChatGPT to respond to, and then text will be auto-generated.
For all the above options, you can also auto-regenerate a story title and/or individual story paragraphs by clicking the respective “Draft with AI” buttons on the story template screen. You can also manually edit any of the auto-generated story content, including dragging and dropping content from the Available Content panel on the right-hand side of the story page.
Also note that while it’s not yet possible to auto-generate Global stories (i.e., stories covering multiple projects) via AI, this is a planned future enhancement.
Data Interpretation
One other area where b.world is taking advantage of AI is in indicator data. This enhances b.world’s existing Insights feature, where you can annotate indicator data with notes about decisions made, obstacles encountered, etc. By clicking the royal blue button labeled with the insights lightbulb icon and a magic wand, b.world will automatically interpret the data that’s been entered for the selected indicator and generate a summary of the data. These automatically generated insights will also show up in the Insights panel and can be edited. They will also automatically be tagged with the hashtags “AI Generated” and “Analysis” to distinguish them from manually written insights. Moreover, just like manually entered insights, auto-generated ones will be available to use within the context of writing a story.
As always, please continue to share your feedback and let us know what you love or if anything is not functioning as expected in the platform. If you're new to b.world, check out a video overview of the platform and then sign up for a free 30-day trial here! Thank you for your ongoing involvement and insight as we strive to design and build a better world with b.world for you and your social impact colleagues around the world.