Shane Young and I love us some AI. We use AI for whatever can. One of the problems with AI these days is that it’s moving so fast we can barely keep up with it. Microsoft’s entry to the AI race, Copilot, is no exception. Every time I turn around, they’re adding new capabilities, or improving some aspect of Copilot’s performance. Shane and I were saying it was too bad there wasn’t a quick way to keep up to date on all this glorious improvement, so we decided to do something about it. We’re doing a quick, TL; DR style podcast on what’s new with Copilot. You can watch the first one now! For those of you that would prefer to read as opposed to watch us, we got you too! We will also be publishing a newsletter to go along with each episode. It can show up right in your inbox if you want.
Let us know what you think. Do you like the rapid fire approach or would you like to hear more of that Shane and Todd banter about the topics? How often do you think we should release one of these? I promise that Shane and I read every comment on the YouTube video, so that’s a great way to tell us what you think.
Hey there, PowerShell enthusiasts and fellow M365 admins! I’ve been tinkering around with a little something I think you’ll find helpful, especially if you’ve been playing around with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. I have been and let me tell you, this has been a wild ride.
Meet Format-ChatGPTConversation, it’s a function I wrote that takes your ChatGPT conversation history and formats it into a more digestible output. If you’ve been in the trenches with ChatGPT, you know that it can be tough to share your conversations with other people. You have to take a bunch of screenshots or just copy out individual parts. Neither of those are any fun. That’s where this function comes into play.
Now, you might be thinking, “That’s great, but where do I find these ChatGPT conversations?” Good news! You can get the conversations.json file right from the OpenAI chat interface. Just head over to https://chat.openai.com/, click on the three dots by your name in the lower left corner, and navigate to “Settings”. Once you’re in there, click the “Data controls” tab, and voila! There’s an “Export” button waiting for you. Clicking that will give you a zip file, and nestled inside it is your conversations.json file.
So what does Format-ChatGPTConversation actually do? Well, it processes this JSON file, extracting relevant conversation details like the title, ID, create time, author, and content. Any system messages or messages without an author are left out. We don’t need them muddying up our beautiful output, do we?
Let’s talk about how to use this bad boy. You can pipe it to the console, save the formatted output to a text file, pass multiple JSON files through the pipeline, or even group the output by conversation title. Here are a few examples:
All of those examples are included in the Examples in the function. You can get to them with help Format-ChatGPTConversation -Examples after you’ve downloaded and imported it.
Ain’t that a sight for sore eyes? It’s like finding a pearl in an oyster. The world of PowerShell and ChatGPT is your oyster, my friends. Go forth and explore.
How do you get this marvel of modern technology? Go to my PowerShell repo on Github and download it. Then use Import-Module to import it into your PowerShell session.
As always, I’d love to hear how you’re using this function. Are you finding it helpful? Have you made any tweaks or improvements? Let’s have a conversation about our ChatGPT conversations. It’s like Inception, but with less Leonardo DiCaprio and more PowerShell.
