Creating or updating a public-facing FAQ can be a complex task, especially when the guidance provided is broad or unclear. Comparing traditional internet search methods with AI tools like ChatGPT highlights different efficiencies and responsibilities when generating useful, accessible, and accurate content for websites.
Key Insights
- Traditional internet searches often require sifting through multiple sources, watching videos, and evaluating the credibility of unfamiliar websites to gather relevant FAQ content.
- ChatGPT can quickly generate a structured FAQ using plain language, suggested questions and answers, and accessibility features, though human review is still essential to ensure accuracy and alignment with organizational needs.
- While AI tools offer time-saving advantages, users must still verify AI-generated content to ensure it reflects current services and complies with accessibility and community standards.
This lesson is a preview from our AI Fundamentals for Government Employees Course. Enroll in a course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
Let's say you've been asked to update the FAQ on your website for your agency or organization. Maybe you've been given a few parameters, like, you know, it's frequently asked questions, so, you know, make sure you use plain language, make sure it's formatted nicely so people can read it, give accurate guidance for people, you know, who are in person and online, and, you know, reflect a sense of community and we want to be really welcoming or something.
Let's say it's really broad like that, and, geez, I've never written an FAQ before. I don't know how to do this. So what I'm going to demo for us here is, again, a traditional internet search, and we'll use ChatGPT.
We'll use one of these AI assistants to just compare what the differences are. So I've written, so you don't have to watch me type, a actually pretty comprehensive search in Google. I'm going to go, I'm just going to drop, I'm already in Chrome, so this knows it's a search bar.
I'm going to drop that whole prompt in here, which says, because it's really long, create a simple, plain language public services FAQ that covers general questions that residents might ask government agencies, include accessibility considerations, clear next steps for each answer, and content appropriate for online and in-person services. So it was actually like a probably unrealistically detailed internet search, but let's see what happens. All right, so I have plugged that in, and I've got a link here to digital.gov, and it was a really long prompt, so it, you know, it didn't take every single one of my questions, but okay, this is something I could open up.
I'm going to throw that in a new tab. The Behavioral Services Department has another one, so I could compare those two. Let me look that one up too, and it is nice, you know, these give us a little bit of a header here, a series of guides to help you.
It doesn't answer our question yet, though, so we've got to dig into it. More and more agencies are using plain language initiatives, okay, so that's good. They often start, well, we don't know, we've got to read it.
Here's a video that could be nice. Let me open that in a new tab, a little more on plain language, and okay. So, you know, we can watch a video, we can open up a couple of different tabs.
Looks like we have, you know, some academic resources and some government resources. I don't necessarily know a lot of these organizations, so, you know, we would still want to, you know, be our human judge and, you know, it would be on us to look at all these tabs and watch these videos and determine which was correct and what we wanted to use, but if I wanted a simple plain language FAQ, all right, adding detail here in Google didn't really help us out, so let me even be simpler. I'm going to say, help me create an FAQ for a website.
So, maybe being less specific helps us in this instance. Okay, this looks, oh, that's an ad, okay. Chat GPT, nice.
FAQ generator, oh, that's nice. I bet that uses some AI. Zendesk has best practices and things, so, okay, you're kind of, you're getting the sense, right? We would play with our internet search a little bit.
Sometimes being really specific might not help us because, again, as we saw in this example, a lot of it was related to plain language and things, but even making it less specific, we'd have to, you know, follow the same things. It looks like we've got, you know, some blog posts from different organizations, some recommended videos we could watch. Again, I don't know all of these websites necessarily, so I'd have to be the human judge and, you know, see if it was any good or not, or maybe it was just somebody trying to sell their product.
Okay, so that's what this looks like in a traditional internet search. We've got a bunch of reading to do, and we would still want to verify. I'm going to open up a new tab here, and this time, though, go to chatgpt.com. I'm going to use ChatGPT because I know that a lot of other GPTs that folks are using, like, you know, Nibiru GPT, or maybe it's Copilot, something like that, they're based off of ChatGPT, OpenAI's product, and if they're not based off ChatGPT, they're very similar, so the principles here are all pretty interchangeable.
So I've gone to ChatGPT.com. I haven't logged in or anything, and I'm just going to do a simple demo here, so I'm not going to do that, but, you know, very clean, nice interface, not scary. I'm going to paste that same detailed prompt into ChatGPT. Same one that I put in Google here moments ago.
Create a simple, plain language FAQ that covers general questions, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Okay, let's see how ChatGPT handles it. And, wow, no time at all. Here's a simple FAQ.
Public Services FAQ. How do I get a copy of my birth certificate? It even begins to answer the question. Now, maybe, you know, at my agency or organization, you know, we actually don't have a vital records website or something, but look at what it's doing.
It's given me a nice numbered heading, numbered headings with suggestions for questions, answers, and possible next steps. Now, just like with our internet search, again, I have to be the human judge here and go make sure that, you know, we actually have that part of our website or that it's true that, you know, forms are available in multiple languages and large print and things like that, but this is pretty nice, right? This is how it works. I don't have to open up a whole bunch of tabs.
I just have to verify that all this copy is correct. So, this is really handy and useful. And as we'll see in some different modules, we can continue to wrestle with this prompt response to get even more specific.
So, hopefully, that illustrates pretty well the difference in the possible, you know, hours that could be saved between, you know, if you're doing a traditional search and, you know, reading a bunch of different posts and watching a bunch of different videos and just plugging it into an AI assistant where you just kind of have to nip and tweak and touch up areas that aren't necessarily true.
