3 Geospatial Uses for ChatGPT (GPT3) 🧩

ChatGPT is being used in many ways. Right now it can feel like the wild west, but I wanted to give you a few ideas as to how you can use ChatGPT today for some of your everyday geospatial processes.

1.  Pulling and formatting lists into tables 📊

Using the method laid out in this tweet, I did my own experiment with national park locations. This made it incredibly easy to copy and paste this data into a spreadsheet that could be imported to a map.

2.  Finding and Filtering Census Data 📊

While this response was close to a google result, I really did enjoy the "suggestions" it offered me. Guiding me to the datasets I'd need to look in, assuming I was coming to the table with no idea of what I was doing.

Then I refined the search and asked for steps to find this data. I wanted to see if we could drill down and get a more detailed response. It was my hope that I could get a similar table as above here. However it wasn't able to pull that information.

ChatGPT was able to return the step by step instructions on where and how to find and filter the data. Steps like this might seem obvious to you if you've done this before, but I can't tell you how valuable this might have been when I was learning about data sources early on. I really got excited when I started thinking about training new staff and how helpful these ChatGPT instructions could help.

3.  Editing scripts on the fly for Google Earth Engine 🐍

I started with asking for a simple google earth engine script to show NDVI over a the center of a city of interest. Now this script was not perfect but it took a lot of the repetitive work out of the task.

Now this script was not perfect but it took a lot of the repetitive work out of the tasks such as adding layers and creating the bands and filtering.

However I wanted to add a legend. So I asked ChatGPT to edit the script to include a legend. Within a few seconds, we had a legend in our map.

Again, the script isn't perfect and needed a few adjustments here and there. But I really did enjoy not having to make slight adjustments myself. Creating a custom color ramp or making design changes was much easier.