Issue #62: My Tips for ChatGPT and Writing Great Prompts
Howdy👋🏾. I recently delivered an AI talk for the University of Baltimore’s AI in Practice series, and I was asked a question I often get at these events. What are my recommendations for writing better prompts and avoiding hallucinations? So this week, I thought I’d put together my top tips for getting the most out of ChatGPT and other AI models.
When writing a prompt the most important thing is being clear and detailed about what you’re asking. One of the easiest ways to trigger a hallucination is by leaving out crucial details, forcing the model to fill in gaps on its own.
For example, questions like “Should I wear shorts next week?” or “Where should I eat for lunch?” are vague. Where is the person located? What kind of food do they like? What’s the weather like next week? Without this context, the AI model will likely generate a response based on guesses, leading to inaccurate or incomplete information. Giving these details and filling in these gaps can fundamentally change the way a model might respond.
For another example, I might ask “Should I bring shorts when traveling to New Orleans in early October?” Or “Where should I bring a pescatarian friend for lunch in the Hampden area of Baltimore for a quick and low-cost lunch?”
The more detail we can offer the better your response, and the less information we leave the AI model to guess or assume.
Of course, adding all that detail can make prompts long and repetitive—especially if you’re constantly providing the same information, like your location. To help with this, ChatGPT introduced two great features, Customization and Memory, which work in the free and paid versions of ChatGPT.
Customization Options
Customization offers two features:
Your Details: This allows you to provide basic information about yourself so ChatGPT doesn’t require you to repeat it constantly. For instance, letting it know I’m in Baltimore, MD means I can ask, “Where should I go for lunch?” without re-entering my location every time.
Response Preferences: You can set how you want ChatGPT to respond—whether you prefer a formal or casual tone, more concise replies, or even responses that include jokes. This feature saves time by applying these settings to every chat.
This information is automatically added to new chat conversations by default by setting these customization options.
Memory Feature
Another useful feature is Memory. While custom instructions set general guidelines for how ChatGPT responds, the memory feature learns from your ongoing conversations, storing information to provide better answers in the future. You can review or delete memories whenever you like, ensuring ChatGPT evolves to suit your needs while respecting your privacy.
If you mention something ChatGPT sees as potentially relevant for future conversations, like your favorite color, or type of food, or you ask it to remember something for future chats it will add it to the memory and store it.
Making an Agent
Once you’re ready to write a prompt, remember that prompts do more than ask questions. They can set ground rules, provide a personality, or specify how ChatGPT should handle the interaction.
For example: “Your name is Zara, and you are a business advisor and marketing expert. You help large entrepreneurs and business owners nail down their start-up ideas, understand finances, create pitch decks, create elevator pitches, and focus on the go-to-market strategy. You’re concise and friendly but not afraid to deliver bad news.”
Starting with a prompt like this, helps the context of a chat understand the role it should look at and understand information. Of course, don’t stop here, you want to add details about the business and any issues you need help with.
Keep in mind that ChatGPT can easily read through files – so upload a copy of your business plan, pitch decks, or other documents and it will absorb that information and use it in its analysis.
If you’re worried that ChatGPT might take this proprietary data and use it to train, always remember that in settings, under Data controls, you can deselect the default option to use your chats to improve the model.
Know the Limits
Finally, understand the limitations of AI. “LLMs are software systems, and by nature, they struggle with understanding the concept of time. These models are trained on vast amounts of data, but their intelligence and knowledge are limited to the age of that data, which is usually months old if not years old. This is crucial to remember because AI won’t know today’s date, the current weather, breaking news, details on the recent presidential debates, or the score of the latest Saints game.
Some AI models use Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which integrates real-time information from sources like web searches. This helps fill in the gaps where the model’s knowledge might be outdated or incomplete. Systems like Perplexity AI mix in the results of web search with the data of the model to provide more real-time answers – but again the underlying AI model’s normal response is being augmented with the additional information from the search results giving in newfound knowledge it might not otherwise have.
To learn about the limitations of the system you are using occasionally ask simple questions – like inquiring about the current year, the weather, or specific topics you need assistance with. This helps supplement those gaps by giving information through a more detailed prompt or by providing files that include this information.
So, those are some of my OpenAI tips! These tips work for any AI model out there. Now, here are my thoughts on tech & things:
🛡️ Cloudflare Gives Creators Control Over AI Crawlers
Let’s face it—robots.txt wasn’t built for the AI age. Cloudflare now offers website owners a simple way to block AI models from scraping their content, but will this limit your visibility in AI-powered tools?
Read more
🕶️ Meta Connect 2024 Kicks Off
Meta Connect kicks off on Sept 25th, and we’re expecting big announcements around new AR, VR, and AI products. Will we also see new Ray-Ban smart glasses and updates to Meta’s Llama AI models?
Read more
⚡️The Environmental Impact of AI
Training advanced AI models takes immense power—ChatGPT-3 used as much energy as 120 average households. Microsoft is reopening the Three Mile Island nuclear plant to power its Azure data centers and OpenAI’s future AI models.
Read more
One last tip, there is nothing wrong with starting a prompt again or asking for details to help you move key points from a conversation to a new thread or another AI model. When I’m working with a model on a programming issue, and I’m unhappy with what it has delivered to me so far – ask it to summarize the key points for me to use as a prompt in another AI model.
Quick update:
đź“• In case you missed it, AI Evolution is available for preorder! Grab it early to lock in a discount and score exclusive beta reader access.
đź“ş I posted the full video of my chat with Mindgrub Director of Mobile and Research and Development, Rob Koch on Apple’s big September iPhone event. Check it out.
🗣️Exciting events are on the horizon—I’ll be speaking, joining panels, and even moderating. I would love to see you there!
| Oct. 5 | BarCamp Philly |
| Oct. 21 | DC Startup & Tech Week |
| Nov. 7 | World Trade Center Institute AGILE Global Innovation Series |
| Dec.12 | AI Summit NYC |
| Jan. 7 | CES |
Good luck and happy prompting!
-jason
p.s. 5 years ago, a Redditor posed a simple question—who are the 6 celebrities on a curtain pattern? After years of speculation, Internet sleuths finally identified the mysterious ‘Celebrity Number 6.’ Check out the solved mystery here.
