Without knowing how to prompt ChatGPT effectively it will remain a novelty tool with no real value. You’ll create generic mediocrity, not masterpieces worthy of sharing. You’ll waste more time than you save. The novelty factor will soon wear off and you’ll be back at the drawing board running your business the manual way.
What’s the alternative? Learn how to prompt effectively. Lucas Pimentel is an AI developer and self-confessed “prompt junkie” who publicly builds apps with artificial intelligence to solve real business problems. He tweets about AI, prompting and solopreneurship and releases guides to ChatGPT prompting to help others do the same. Pimentel suggested that “creating good prompts is easy when you follow the right framework and take out the guesswork,” leading to reliable ways to automate tasks.
How to write great ChatGPT prompts in 7 simple steps
Assign a role
ChatGPT can be all things to all people, so tell if who you want it to be for you. “Assigning a role to your AI counterpart will make them adopt the behavior of the role you assign.” It sounds so simple, but plenty of people miss out this first step.
“You will realize that the overarching theme of a good prompt is to control the behavior of the AI, while giving it enough room to be creative.” Pimentel said this can be “a hard balance to strike.”
In practice, use the line, “You will take the role of a [role],” where this might be a social media expert, compassionate speaker, personal development coach, or anything else. Decide who you want ChatGPT to embody as you move through the next steps,
Give a clear, descriptive, and accurate task
Tell ChatGPT what you want it to do. “I want you to [instruction],” where the instruction is, “a clear, descriptive, and accurate task,” advised Pimentel. “The more comprehensive your prompt, the better the results will be.”
This is the difference between asking, “Write me a blog post,” and “Write me a six paragraph first-person blog post designed for an audience of cat lovers, that includes a funny story, ends with a question, shares that I have a ginger cat called Orlando and mentions [brand name] of cat food.”
Pimentel said you don’t need to put everything in one prompt. “You can even break down bigger tasks into smaller ones.” Perhaps you first ask for headline options, then summaries, then you get down to the main event. Either way, be incredibly accurate in your ask.
Provide context
Context matters. Here’s where Pimentel said you should, “include everything in your prompt that you think will help ChatGPT do a better job.” When Pimentel asks the AI to write for him, he includes information on the writing style that he likes, the purpose of the text and any background information to set up the scene and guide the piece.
If in doubt, give more context. Get creative with the backstory and the minutiae of information. You never know what the extra material might mean for what is produced.
If you’re asking ChatGPT to write in your style, tell it who you are and what you do. If you want it to produce the words for your website’s homepage, explain your company’s mission first. Anything you want to create, go into detail when setting the scene.
Provide examples
Don’t just tell ChatGPT the context, show them too. “Examples will help the AI emulate a style and do exactly what you want,” said Pimentel. “Stuff it with examples of the tasks you want it to achieve.”
Large language models are capable of processing copious amounts of data. Unlike a human, who might make notes and forget about most of them, a model will process requests and handle every bit of information. Make the most of this power in your prompts.
Whatever you’re asking for, give ChatGPT an example of what you want. If you want it to write tweets, copy in tweets that previously did well. If you want it to make you an SOP, paste one in that’s exactly the right style. These examples don’t have to be your own, you can give it a repertoire of content to emulate from multiple sources.
Create rules
With humans and machines, following rules produces the best results. Pimentel said most people miss this part out, because they think it’s redundant, “but it’s actually key to getting the most out of your models.” Here’s where you go ahead and list everything you want the AI to do.
Be specific in your rules. Ask for the output in a two column table, in sentence case, or explained in a way a 5-year-old could understand. Ask for a specific number of words per sentence, ask for certain objects to be mentioned, instruct it along the straight and narrow like the strictest of headmasters.
The more definite the rules you put in, the more ChatGPT can be creative within those rules. Its high processing power should consider what’s required.
Create constraints
“I like to separate what I want the AI to do and what I don’t want it to do in two different instructions, because I believe this yields better outputs,” said Pimentel. So, as well as telling your AI the rules, in the last step, tell it what to avoid. “Create a list of constraints for what you don’t want the AI to do.”
ChatGPT will find a way to follow your constraints, so try a few out and see how it performs. You can always edit your prompt to regenerate the response if it doesn’t go well, or if you want to add more. A human might ignore them, but a machine won’t.
The constraints included in your prompt can be as specific as you like: “Don’t use two words when one will suffice.” “Don’t use idioms.” “Don’t alienate the audience by [action].” “Don’t use the letter W.” Whatever constraints you put in place, ChatGPT will work within them or give you a very good reason why it can’t.
Evaluate and iterate
Finally, be prepared to make changes. “You will rarely create the perfect prompt to automate a time-consuming task from the start,” said Pimentel. So have patience. Pimentel knows this process is iterative, so after each set of results, evaluate, make changes to your prompt and see if you can get better results.
“Save your prompt somewhere handy,” he added. The goal is that you refine it over time so, one day soon, you will find the perfect recipe that can keep delivering. But don’t stop until you get there.
This might not happen in one go, it might take a few weeks. “Next time, try to make the prompt a little better,” he said. Think small, iterative changes, not wholesale edits or going back to the drawing board.
Garbage in, garbage out. Genius in, genius out. Learn how to prompt ChatGPT effectively to unlock a new level of output and stop wasting your time. Follow these seven simple steps to perfect, repeatable prompting that will turn you and your AI co-pilot into an impressive output machine.
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