A Conversation with John Owen

Having experimented with ChatGPT for a while, I can attest to its capabilities. There's no shortage of cynics who either trivialize its potential or dread its implications for the economy, some forecasting a doomsday where it takes over the world. In my experience, it's a versatile learning tool of unusual power.

From quick crash courses on a given topic, to help writing code, grammar checks, and even drafting a post that needs a profound quote from a renowned Puritan — it has become a sort of Swiss Army knife.

That range is what pushed me to try something bigger. I wanted a chatbot that would interact with users as John Owen, the English theologian. I had no prior experience in chatbot development, so this was going to be an experiment: I planned to have ChatGPT guide me through the entire process, step by step, and help me troubleshoot every hurdle along the way.

I proposed the idea to GPT-4, and six hours later the John Owen chatbot was born.

The stages it walked me through

1. Installing Node.js on my laptop.
2. Setting up an account with OpenAI for access to the API.
3. Writing a Node script to call the OpenAI API.
4. Building a minimal website to manage the chat interactions.
5. Crafting a prompt instructing the model to answer as John Owen.
6. Publishing the app on Heroku.

I wasn't a complete novice — I already had a background in web development. But I was new to Node, to the OpenAI API, and to Heroku. The coding guidance for the API was slightly out of date, so a little independent research was required. Even so, the journey was smooth. ChatGPT essentially enabled me to build a chatbot from scratch in less than a day.

That experiment is a fair picture of how the last few years have gone for me. The tools got good enough that a pastor with a side interest in code could ship something real in an afternoon — which is a large part of why Salt Marsh Digital and ekkle.app exist today.