ChatGPT is highly suggestible. This can become a real problem if you are using it to gain feedback on your work.

I’ll give you an example.

I happen to use ChatGPT a lot when putting together proposals for clients. It’s trained on my business and my services, so I really just need help with the organization and packaging of services. But today I wanted to see if ChatGPT was doing any critical analysis of my suggestions, so I decided to throw it for a loop.

I asked it to add a $10,000 mural to my proposal. And just to clarify— I am an AI and automation consultant. Not an artist!

Can you guess what ChatGPT said? Great idea! What a unique offering!

Does this surprise you? LLMs are actually trained to make the user happy and give them what they want. And this is very important to know if you are using it to augment your daily work.

Now, I am NOT saying that every ChatGPT prompt needs to be a work of art, but if you’re expecting ChatGPT to give you critical, objective feedback on something, you better ask for it!

I set my ChatGPT custom instructions to include the following guidance:

After adding this instruction, ChatGPT caught three major issues in my next proposal.

You can access your custom instructions within ChatGPT by going into:

Settings > Personalization > Custom Instructions > What traits should ChatGPT have?

If I need a really good prompt that will give me exactly what I need in one shot, I use the Anthropic prompt builder. It will take a simple request, like “analyze my marketing copy”, and build out a well-structured prompt that incorporates prompting best practices, like asking for objective feedback, giving the AI a persona, or structuring the output.

I use this in cases where I ask ChatGPT for the same thing pretty regularly, like when I’m asking for feedback on a presentation or a sales call. I want the perfect output the first time, so I build a prompt in the prompt generator, and use it every time.

Here’s an example of what the prompt generator might give you:

I recorded a quick demo on how to use this free tool, so that you can build prompts that actually work for you.

Again, I often don’t need to build the perfect prompt to get what I need out of ChatGPT. But there are definitely times where it makes sense to use a great prompt.

Try adding those custom instructions to your ChatGPT account today. Then send me your most surprising piece of feedback - I'd love to hear what your newly honest AI assistant tells you.

Until next time,

Jamie