Even if you’ve been diligently using AI since the youngest days of ChatGPT (late 2022), you may not realize that you can still get more out of it.
If you avoid a few small but crucial mistakes when creating prompts or when dealing with ChatGPT in general, you will notice a significant improvement in the results.
1. Edit multiple topics in one chat session
ChatGPT remembers the content of your current chat. First of all, this is a good thing, because it allows you to get better results for a single topic.
However, this looks different if you edit several topics in one chat. This can cause ChatGPT to get a bit messed up and give you incorrect results.
2. Trusting ChatGPT too much
ChatGPT is very error-prone and likes to present incorrect results with great confidence. This can lead to over-trusting ChatGPT. So always make sure that the information is correct.
Even Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and creator of ChatGPT, warns about his creation on Twitter:
link to Twitter content
In German:
“ChatGPT is incredibly limited, but good enough at some things to give a misleading impression of size.
It’s a mistake to rely on it for anything important. It’s a preview of progress; we still have a lot of work to do on robustness and truthfulness.«
3. Being inaccurate about your output goals
It can happen that you are not satisfied with the output of ChatGPT. You can often counter this by writing detailed prompts.
For example, if you have English texts translated and ChatGPT translates “you” with “Sie”, you can tell the AI ​​in the prompt that it should translate everything with “du” from now on.
You can of course do this with various other examples.
What is a prompt? A prompt is what you tell ChatGPT or other AIs to do. In other words: a prompt is your chat input. The detailed formulation of the prompt is the be-all and end-all if you want to see the best possible result.
4. Don’t give examples
Did you know that you can give ChatGPT examples? If the AI ​​gives a text, it can imitate it. The possible applications are manifold.
For example, you could have your text rewritten into a poem in the style of your favorite author. Or take old formulations and structures from your texts and transfer them to a new topic.
Be sure to state precisely what exactly is to be taken from the examples.
5. Don’t use personas
If you don’t know this procedure yet, then you should definitely try it out, because personas can change the behavior of ChatGPT and significantly improve the quality of the output.
What is meant by persona? Of course we are not talking about the role-playing classic, but about personalities that you let ChatGPT slip into.
For example: »From now on I want you to behave like a retail clerk’s assistant. Your job is to answer emails that come from important business customers«
With a persona, ChatGPT can better imagine what exactly you need.
6. Use ChatGPT for math
OpenAI’s AI is undoubtedly powerful, but it has many weaknesses. Mathematics is one of their greatest.
ChatGPT is wonderful for explaining things to you, creating curricula or similar. However, if the bot is supposed to calculate itself, it quickly reaches its limits.
He can do simple things, but you should always check the results yourself, which more or less makes the whole thing absurd.
7. Don’t ask for less output
ChatGPT means well with us and often gives out a lot of information. We claim: too many. Sometimes the AI ​​rambles a bit, but you can correct that.
Initially, you may have an instinct to take a written text and shorten it yourself. While this is a safe method, you can let ChatGPT help you with this.
You can always ask ChatGPT to shorten, rewrite, or summarize previous answers.
8. Enter ChatGPT only one entry per prompt
Smaller and simpler prompts will get you there faster, but you probably won’t like it as much as taking your time with your prompt.
That means: Everything that ChatGPT should implement should also be described in as few (or only one) prompt as possible. So don’t be afraid to put several lines of text in one prompt.
It can help to experiment with different short prompts and then merge them into one long prompt in a new chat.
9. Don’t edit prompts
Sure, the first result can of course be satisfactory, but maybe there’s more to it?
Keep trying to improve your prompts, even if you’re happy with the first answer. The better the result, the easier it is to transfer the prompt to other things.
Of course, this tip is all the more important if you are dissatisfied with the result.
10. No structure in prompts
As already mentioned, it is an advantage if you write long, detailed prompts. But it is even better if you also structure them.
In your structure, try to make these things clear:
- The persona tailored to your problem
- The task
- The individual steps according to which the task is to be solved
- context
- Restrictions / Rules (e.g. »You« instead of »You«)
- Format in which the result should be output
So we have come to the end of our list. We hope you can use this to improve your prompt game a bit.
Did our list help you? Which of these have you done more often? What do you use ChatGPT for anyway and did our tips help you to work better with the AI ​​from now on? Do you have any other mistakes to avoid when using ChatGPT? Write us your opinions and experiences in the comments!