Week 10: What I'm Learning About Prompts

Practice Makes Better (prompting)

This is my personal journal about my learning journey in AI and ML for marketing. With over twenty years of experience managing and marketing tech companies, I have deep knowledge of marketing analytics and attribution, always focused on generating measurable and meaningful business results. For the last nine years, I've advised and served marketing leaders in tech companies, enabling me to share my insights on the impacts of AI and ML, including privacy and ethics issues, through this Substack. You can learn more about me, including my policy on using AI for this blog, in the "About" section of this Substack. I welcome your suggestions for further education on AI and ML.

In This Issue:

• Practice Makes Better (Prompting)

• Playing With Midjourney Substack and Bing Images

• Celebrating Humanity

• What’s Next
  

Practice Makes Better (Prompting)

Note: If you’re bored with all the “prompt tips” you see everywhere, I get it. I am too. This is written for me and my followers, who tell me they want to hear from me specifically on this topic.

If you’re like most people, after you got your OpenAI account, you stared at that open chat box and thought “What now?”

You are not alone. The blank page is a known problem, even among professional writers. It was a key barrier to the widespread adoption of Second Life. It’s that horrible feeling when someone asks you a question and you just…freeze.

It’s ok. I’ve got you. Fear not, and read on.

If you’re already playing around and want to jump to the next level with me, you can skip this next section.

The Absolute Noob’s ChatGPT Icebreaker List

Here are some sample prompts that you can use to get started. These are all ones that I created myself as I was trying to learn how ChatGPT works. (A gentle reminder that ChatGPT is a brand name for a generative language model. It’s like Kleenex for “facial tissue.”) Here are three sample prompts, in increasing order of complexity.

• Who is Melinda Byerley? I wrote about this journey earlier, here. Obviously, the point is to ask it who YOU are and see what it says.

• How do I cook a 6.795 pound boneless leg of lamb so that it is tender and juicy while being cooked no more than medium rare? My prompt size is starting to expand, and I’m still at that point thinking about ChatGPT as a “Google Synthesizer.”

• Please give me a weekly meal plan with X calories per day, with no more than y from fat, and at least x% protein. Limit red meat to twice per week, and limit dairy except for butter, yogurt, and cheese. Include at least 7-10 fruits and vegetables per day. Now I’m getting “crazy’ and thinking about how much can I get ChatGPT to tell me that would take me hours to research on my own.

My Next Level Of Prompting

I love that ChatGPT can save my prompts. This is one reason to have a paid account, beyond just accessing the more advanced GPT4 model. This allows me to keep a series of prompts, as the model learns with me, and can build upon itself over time.

Example 1: Becoming a better bridge player

In 2021, I set a goal to learn how to play bridge. I was an absolute newcomer to the game, though I had played a lot of cards in my life, and was a competitive chess player in high school. (Varsity Letter in Chess = Nerd Badge Unlocked)

I’ve been taking live classes, in person, with a break during cancer treatment. As I was recovering, I got back into it, and I’m spending pretty much every spare minute I have that isn’t on AI, and recovering from cancer, playing bridge. But I felt stuck in some key areas, and as I am doing with most questions in my life these days, I decided to ask ChatGPT. Here’s the first prompt.

you are a world expert in duplicate bridge who loves to help beginners learn and grow. I am your student. I have taken a basic class with a good instructor. I know the stayman and Jacoby conventions. Help me understand how to play better duplicate bridge at my level so I can get more masterpoints.

I left two spaces in between sentences because some habits die hard. Nevertheless…

I got this output. We all recognize it. It’s the “Oh wow, how fast,” followed by “Meh, it’s pretty bland and unactionable.” Stay with me, and at least skim it, because I’m going to show you how I iterated on it to take things to the next level.

Here are some things to notice in the response that you can consider in your own prompts.

1. Conversational and Friendly Tone: I like teachers that reinforce me as they help me from getting discouraged when things go wrong. And in Bridge, things often go very, very wrong.

2. Ideas For More Research. There’s a difference between knowing what to do and doing it. Look at the last part of #2. I knew what 2 of the things listed were: negative doubles and takeout doubles. But I didn’t know what cue bids were. That was a suggestion for me to go research.

3. Ok, Now What? Mostly, this was a list of pretty basic and generic stuff you’d find on any “how to play better bridge” website. Think about the questions you’d want to “drill into” and that’s how you’ll iterate your prompts to a better place. I have a Chrome plugin called “Keywords Everywhere” from my SEO days that offers quick ways to ask ChatGPT to give me more. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like:

   

   
   

   I asked GPT4 to expand, on that list, and got a literal pile of deeper suggestions to go research. Here’s just the first part of the list. See all the detail in there?
   

4. Brainstorming in “Flow:” Leads To Objectives: As I started to think about what parts of my Bridge game needed help, I started thinking about how scoring in duplicate (competitive) bridge was still so mystifying for me. In particular, it bothered me that I could play a hand well, but not get matchpoints. So I asked ChatGPT this:

   I am struggling to understand how scoring in duplicate bridge works--especially how that form of scoring should impact how we play. 

Now look at what comes out, and how helpful it is. When this came out, I was jumping up and down. We had never been taught this in class. It’s amazing. Bridge can be VERY opaque to noobs, as much of the learning is locked up in very old books that take a long time to study; as well as the minds of the folks playing for decades who aren’t always great at explaining it.

5. And So on, And So on. I asked GPT to “exemplify” with the tool above. And I got an example of a specific bridge hand. Et Voila, I’m now better at bridge in this area. I scored more matchpoints in that week’s hand than I had in several weeks.

6. My Trusted Bridge Advisor. This chat is saved in my account, and as I run into questions, I work with the tool and it expands and grows over time.

Example 2: Strategic Prompting = Efficiency

First, an ethical disclosure. I put into practice the advice I received in this blog post. You should check out his YouTube and newsletter. I sincerely loathe charlatans who are taking other people’s content and presenting it as their own without attribution. For the record, I have written the copy here myself. No ChatGPT. It’s mine. Don’t steal it. :D I like to think the value I provide here is the time it took to sift through all their content and find the practical stuff that worked. There is a lot of crap out there masquerading as prompting advice.

If you read the article I just linked to, he provides a lovely framework for thinking about prompts.

• Context

• Clear Objectives

• Specificity

• Iteration

I stumbled into some of this framework with the bridge example: I told it the context around my needs. But I wasn’t clear about my objective, nor was I specific enough to get what I really wanted. I did, however, have the tenacity to keep iterating, and I eventually got there.

The point of this framework is to get us all there faster, with less iteration from the start. Less brute force, if you will, and more elegant and time-saving prompts. I took from his post—with his suggestion—a prompt, and I applied it to the question I have been answering for nearly all of my professional career. Here it is:

Generate a 300-word article for a strategic marketing agency that provides a comprehensive guide to proving the roi of marketing in the c suite. The article should cover various strategies and techniques, and be written in a clear and concise style accessible senior marketers, whether they have an MBA or not. To support your advice, utilize research and expert opinions from credible sources like academic journals, strategic consulting firms, and the advice of expert marketers. Incorporate relevant statistics, examples, and case studies to illustrate your points and bring the advice to life. Consider the potential challenges and obstacles in getting marketing to be respected and appreciated by the CEO, cto and CFO for the value it delivers and offer strategies to overcome them. 

It did a very fine job of organizing information I know very well, but I would never copy and paste this, because I would want to check whether the sources listed are accurate.

Then I simply kept asking GPT4 to drill down and drill down. I got what I wanted in 4 prompts instead of a dozen or more that it took me on the bridge example.

Yes, I could have ultimately written the post myself. But as a person with lifelong ADHD, it might have taken me days, and a LOT of wasted words. I still need to check the final output and add more substance and practical examples, but the executive function is for me akin to wearing eyeglasses: a necessary aid to my performance.

Pro Tip: copy.ai gives a daily suggested prompt. I’ve been using them, and it’s a good reminder to try something new each day.

Celebrating Humanity, with Horses

I came across this story I’d missed last year, about how humans are making farms for racehorses to live out their days in peace and comfort. It sure beats being sent to a glue factory. Pay attention to the lyrical writing quality, which is something that ChatGPT just cannot emulate right now. Think about how you trust this story and the data it provides, simply because you know it’s The Washington Post.

"He convinced his wife, a former Boston Globe columnist, to move to Kentucky after she complied on the condition that he wouldn’t go looking for her once she left him. (She still hasn’t.) Now they and their staff tend to about 300 acres, about 240 retirees and about 91 equine graves, with people who hope to have similar farms seeking counsel from as far away as Japan. Now Blowen knows things he never knew he would, such as that Silver Charm needs to go into the barn at night because he loathes the headlights on the highway."

Playing With Midjourney Bing and Substack Images

Horse. That’s literally the prompt I used in Substack’s "image generator.”

This time I was unable to get Substack’s image generator to give me the picture above based on a simple word: Horse.

To the theme of this post, here’s what it gives me with a more robust prompt. Hey, we’ve been watching “Yellowstone” so that’s where my head is at.

Wild horse in Montana majestic and free

Here’s what Bing’s Image generator gave me for “horse.”

And here’s what it gave me for “Wild horse in Montana majestic and free”

What’s Next

• I’ll be traveling for the next couple of weeks. I’m attending the Build a Better Agency Summit, and most importantly, I’m seeing my mom for the first time since my diagnosis last year.

• Please keep an eye on my “notes” in Substack for quick tips, links, and more. that’s what will help me keep these blogs from being so huge.

• What do you want me to drill into? what’s interesting to YOU? Let me know!