Are you using ChatGPT? It’s easy! Just ask questions, and it’ll give you answers. It’s that simple!
But sometime, it might provide you with answers of low quality, leading to a considerable amount of time wasted in back-and-forth exchanges.
I’ve experienced it myself, and as a result, I dedicated some time to discover the most effective prompts for optimizing my interactions with ChatGPT.
If you’re new to ChatGPT, let me explain. It’s an artificial intelligence (AI) language model made by OpenAI. Imagine chatting with a helpful computer virtual assistant. The trick is asking good questions, which is called prompt engineering. It’s a cool skill for the future. Check out my tips to become a ChatGPT pro!”
Customizing ChatGPT Behavior
I recommend utilizing Custom Instructions as your first step. You can access them by clicking on your profile icon.
So, if you navigate to Custom Instructions, you can provide instructions to ChatGPT by submitting a note to ChatGPT that explains who you are, what you want, and how you want ChatGPT to respond.
You won’t need to restate your preferences in each conversation if you follow this approach.
So, the first question is: What would you like ChatGPT to know about you to provide better responses?
It helps if you can provide some context about yourself. So, I say ‘I’m a software developer based in Karachi working with Java, WordPress & Swift.’
The next question is: how would you like ChatGPT to respond? We get some thought starters, like how formal or casual should ChatGPT be.
For example, I put “Answers should be long and have code snippets that I can pull out and use. You can think like a developer or web designer when giving answers.” Then i Click on ‘Save’ Button.
Testing Our Custom Instructions
Next, I am testing our custom instructions. Now, let’s go and start a new chat and I am going to ask ‘Can you provide me some advice for how to structure my user interface for my e commerce website?’.
When I send this, it just provides the advice with explanation and code snippets as per I enter in custom instructions.
Displaying ChatGPT’s Confidence Level
Now another thing could be quite helpful is to tell ChatGPT to always inform us about the confidence level of its answer. So again, go to custom instructions and replace this section with “Always add the confidence level of your answer. When your answer includes facts, always provide a valid URL with the source for your answer. And if you speculate or predict something, inform me.” And now click on ‘save’ button.
Now let’s test this out and ask it ‘What was the reason for huge initial success of Java?’.
When I run this, I get an accurate answer with confidence level high and I get a valid URL for this too.
Self-Critique
Next topic is Self-Critique. Self-Critique is another great option. You can ask ChatGPT to review its own text and provide feedback. It sounds funny, but it really works well.
I am going to ask it ‘Now act as a critic. Be ruthless. Analyze the text and tell me where it can be better.’
ChatGPT will go over the reply and provide step-by-step feedback on potential issues. It also went ahead and revised this original reply.
Self-Prompting
Next topic is self-prompting. So, how about using ChatGPT to self-prompt to optimize its own prompt? Here’s how you can do that. To get the perfect prompt, I could ask ChatGPT to suggest 3 perfect prompts that really show off its power.
It will usually come back with some questions about the topic, in this case, about the primary goal and purpose, dates, locations, and other useful information.
Now I provide my answers. And send this to chatGPT.
Now ChatGPT starts writing 3 emails for me as per the prompts. Now we can see that it has a nice subject, the tune is soft and casual and it’s highlighting the bonding and relationships.
Now compare this to a case where I don’t optimize the prompt. So, I ask ChatGPT to ‘write an email to my team encouraging them to participate in our team building event.’
It’s not a surprise for me that I get a very generic email about team-building and what generally team-building events are designed to do. So, as you can see, self-prompting can give you a much better result.
Make it Crisp
Next topic is Make it Crisp. Often when you ask ChatGPT to write something, the reply can be very long. To avoid this, you have to tell ChatGPT to make it to specific word counts. So, let’s check it by asking a question and ask for maximum length should be 500 words.
So, you can see that the answer is according to our requirements. Another alternative is to tell ChatGPT to reduce the length of the answer. So, for this a good prompt is “Now say the same thing more concise and briefer using only 50% as many words”. As you see it cut down the size of answer.
Specify the Output Format
Next topic is to Specify the Output Format. ChatGPT has many different output formats, not just plain text. For example, you can tell it give you the response in a table format. Let’s check it by asking a question ‘Create a table with the winners of the Cricket world cups between 1985 to 2020. The headings should be year, winner, and runners-up’.
Now you can see the response is in table format.
Wrap Up
These are some tips to get the most out of ChatGPT or any large language model AI.
It comes down to the old principle: garbage in, garbage out. Keep this in mind, and you’ll make better use of these new tools.
I hope you found this helpful.