If you made a cake with the wrong ingredients, you wouldn’t expect a delicious treat to come out of the oven. And you’ll never get to the bottom of who broke your precious family heirloom without asking your guilty-looking kids the right questions.
The same principle can be applied to using AI chatbots. Fail to prepare the right prompts, and prepare to get back responses that fail to deliver what you really wanted.
You may have previously dabbled with ChatGPT and wondered what all the fuss was about, as it spat out responses that only partially answered your query or didn’t really seem to get what you were trying to achieve.
But it’s a very powerful tool for everyday use and, employed effectively, has the potential to speed up tedious tasks and get you the information you need in seconds.
Not prompting correctly
We may still be some way off from artificial general intelligence, but you should treat your chatbot the way you would a human when you ask it questions (just not necessarily with the pleases and thank yous). The quality of the answers you receive depends on the quality of the query you put in.
The key is to be clear and concise.
ChatGPT’s ‘training’ is good enough that it often feels like it’s second-guessing what you’re after. But it has its limitations.
Try not to be too vague (“Write a poem”) or broad (“Tell me about space”). ChatGPT will do its best, but is unlikely to give you the precise response you were hoping for — it may create a humorous limerick instead of a love sonnet, and tell you everything about the solar system but nothing about black holes.
And don’t worry too much about the odd misspelled word or grammatical error — ChatGPT is certainly more forgiving than your old English teacher and can generally interpret what you mean.
Ask follow up questions
Feel like you’ve been clear with your request, but still haven’t got the response that you needed?
Rather than close your browser tab and tell all your friends and family what a load of trash ChatGPT is, follow up with another prompt.
Think of it as a conversation. ChatGPT will remember the previous exchanges and nuance its output accordingly. So that might be adding more detail to its verdict on who the best NFL quarterbacks are (you wanted it based on throwing yards, rather than Super Bowl rings), or making the poster it designed for your upcoming bake sale a little bolder and brighter.
ChatGPT performs best when you ask it more questions or help push it in a certain direction.
And if it’s way off the mark, let it know where it’s gone wrong and it will (very politely!) try again.
Give examples
Giving ChatGPT some examples of the kind of thing you’re looking for is a great way to nudge it in the right direction.
So instead of asking simply for a children’s story about a dog, ask for it in the style of the tales your little one already enjoys — you could request something that reads a bit like the “Gruffalo”, perhaps, or in the manner of Maurice Sendak.
You can be even more prescriptive still by feeding additional information into ChatGPT.
Maybe you’re asking for its help to redesign your backyard. If you have photos or gathered online images of gorgeous gardens, you can upload them into ChatGPT for inspiration and, together with any other instructions you have, it will generate a rough image of what your yard could look like.
Or maybe you’ve read a hilarious article on a satirical website like "The Onion" and like the idea of skewering one of your friends in the same style. Copy and paste the article URL into ChatGPT and let it know some details about your unfortunate buddy, and you’ll have something funny to share on the WhatsApp group in no time.
Remember…it can’t read your mind
Many of us have a friend or family member that knows us so well that they can finish our sentences and guess what we’re thinking just from a look.
ChatGPT isn’t one of them.
It can sometimes feel like it has missed the context you’re after or has answered a query in long paragraphs instead of a simple list.
If you want ChatGPT to specifically give you 10 examples of something, or want it to explain an answer in terms that a six-year-old can understand, then don’t hold back from telling it.
At the risk of repeating ourselves, the more precise you are with your instructions, the happier you’re likely to be with the response.
Not making enough of the extra tools it offers
You may already have gotten the hint from this article that the ‘Chat’ part of ChatGPT’s name slightly undersells the service; it can do much more than give text-based responses to queries.
One obvious example is creating images. This can be as trivial as you wish (ever wondered what Hagrid might look like without his beard? No… us neither!), or for genuinely useful projects like visualizations of your new kitchen or a promotional poster for an event you’re running.
ChatGPT has also become a great device for amateur coders creating basic tools and apps. If you’re a keen bread baker, a few clear prompts can create a mechanism that alerts you for all the different stages involved in making sourdough bread (from all your stretches and folds to when you should remove the loaf from the oven). Or you could create your own customized set of daily puzzles and quizzes to exercise the brain each morning.
Other tools become available only if you pay to sign up for a premium ChatGPT plan.
For example, ChatGPT Plus opens up agent mode that lets you use the chatbot like your own PA to complete online tasks (e.g. scheduling, filling out forms, editing spreadsheets, etc) on your behalf.
Plus, once you start paying for ChatGPT, you can begin to make use of OpenAI’s Sora video generator.
Forgetting about attachments
Ever wondered what the little ‘+’ sign is on the left of the ‘Ask anything’ box in ChatGPT?
Alongside other shortcuts, there’s the option to ‘Add photos & files.’
If you want ChatGPT to quickly summarize the key talking points of a PDF you’ve been sent, or need to pull out some pertinent data buried deep in an Excel spreadsheet, you can upload the file and give your instructions accordingly.
As described above, uploading photos or other documents of your own can really help when trying to direct ChatGPT towards a more useful response.
But, used smartly, it can also have a positive impact on productivity.
If you’re somebody who comes out in cold sweats at the thought of calculating your tax return, for example, you could upload pictures of all your invoices and receipts and get ChatGPT to extract the necessary figures to help you on your way.
Or perhaps you have a flat JPEG image file containing text that you want to lift and copy to a word processing document — ChatGPT can help with that, too.
More from Tom's Guide
- I tested ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini with 7 real high-stakes situations — here’s the winner
- I tested 5 custom GPTs — skip the rest and try these today
- Most people miss these 3 ChatGPT tricks — and they dramatically improve your results
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