Don't Use ChatGPT Until You Watch This Video

By now, you've probably started using ChatGBT, right? It's not rocket science. Anyone can ask questions and it's going to give you answers. In school, we learned that there are no bad questions. In ChatGBT world, there are. It's not going to tell you that, but it's going to give you poor quality answers and you're just going to waste a lot of time going back and forth. I've been there super annoyed, so I decided to spend some time to find the best prompts to get the most out of ChatGBT. My first tip for you is to take advantage of custom instructions, which you're going to find by clicking on your profile icon. So when you go to custom instructions, you have the ability to hand over a note to ChatGBT that explains who you are, what you want, and how you want ChatGBT to respond. This way, you won't have to repeat your preferences in every single conversation. So the first question is, what would you like ChatGBT to know about you to provide better responses? It helps if you can provide it some context about yourself. So for example, if you're a teacher, let it know. If you're a student, an accountant, a lawyer, let it know. This way, it can give you responses that are more relevant to your line of work. If you want responses that are relevant to your region, tell it where you live, not the exact address, but just the area where you are. So for example, you could say, I'm a software developer based in Chicago working with Python. Or you could say, I'm a marketing professional in New York writing advertising copy, right? You get the idea. The next question is, how would you like ChatGBT to respond? We get some thought starters, like how formal or casual should ChatGBT be? For example, you could put in language and tone should be friendly and casual. You can decide if ChatGBT can have opinions on topics or remain neutral, and if responses should be long or short. And this can really make a difference because you can get rid of a lot of frustrating back and forth. So for example, let's say you're good in Excel and you use ChatGBT to help you out when you get stuck, but you don't like seeing all those explanations about the solutions. So what you could write is, when I ask for Excel formulas, just provide the most efficient formula without any explanation. If you were a programmer and you didn't want to see all those programming explanations, you could type in, when I ask you for code, just give me the most efficient code with code snippets without additional explanation. Right, so that's really helpful. In this case, I'm picky about Excel formulas. I'm going to leave this in and click on save. Now, let's go and start a new chat, and I'm going to ask it for a formula just to make sure this works. Let's say I'm in Excel, I'm struggling with updating this formula. Currently, it's returning everything that's greater than 12,000, but I want to change this to be between 12,000 and 15,000. And I have no idea how to tell it to do it between these values. I'm going to go back to ChatGBT and type in my formula, tell it to update this Excel formulas, so it returns values in the B column that are between these two. And when I send this, it just provides the solution without any explanation. Now, without that custom setting, this is what I would get. And sometimes you might just end up with a lot longer explanations like this one. These are great if you don't know your way around, but if you do, they can be pretty annoying. Another thing that could be quite helpful is to tell ChatGBT to always inform us about the confidence level of its answer. This could be quite helpful for factual topics. Now, we can also expand on this and say, 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. Okay, so let's test this out. I'm going to save this, go ahead and start a new chat. And let's ask it, who were the FIFA World Cup winners of the 90s? When I run this, I get 1990 West Germany, Brazil, France, confidence level is high, and I get a list of valid URLs directly from FIFA.com. Right, so these settings can be really helpful. I'm sure you're going to find them handy. Now let's move on to prompts. The first one is to write like you. So if you ask ChatGBT to write some text for you, the results will probably sound a bit generic, right? Even if you emphasize in the custom instructions, the tone, and the style that you want, it might not properly reflect your style of writing. Now, the good news is that you can teach it to write in your own style by giving it some examples. So first, we're going to explain to ChatGBT what we're going to do with this prompt. I'd like you to help me write articles for my productivity blog. Just replace this with whatever type of blog or article you need. First, I want you to understand my writing style based on examples that I give you. You'll save my writing style under LG style. This makes it easier to refer to later. After that, you'll ask me what the topic of my specific content is. You'll then write the article using LG style. Okay, so let's give it a try. Okay, so it understands what we're trying to do, and it's ready for some examples. I'm just going to go and grab some copy from my website. Let's copy this paragraph from the About page and paste it in as example one of LG style. Now, I'll give it a second example of LG style. I'll just go and grab the other copy from here and paste it in. So it summarized my style as informative, personable, and aims to establish a connection. And now it's ready to write our content. So I want to write an article about the importance of daily coffee for productivity. Cool. It starts writing it in my personal writing style, the one that it previously saved. Now, you can, of course, continue working on this and make it better. You can also come back to this chat and ask it to write other related articles. And by the way, if you love your daily coffee, subscribe to this channel because we all love coffee around here. Next up is self-critic. So another great option is to ask ChatGPT to review its own text and provide feedback. It sounds funny, but it really works well. So let's say I asked ChatGPT to provide me with a summary of why Python and Excel can work well together. And it comes up with this reply, which I'm not really happy with. So I'm going to ask it to act as a critic, be ruthless, analyze the text and tell me where it can be better. It will go over the reply and provide step-by-step feedback on potential issues, for example, with clarity, and how adding specific examples could make the summary better, how we could highlight specific capabilities. It also went ahead and revised this original reply, giving examples of Python strengths and Excel strengths. From there, you can further improve on this reply by asking it to specifically emphasize and include some of the previous pointers that it gave us. It's pretty cool, right? Next up is self-prompting. So how about using ChatGPT to self-prompt to optimize its own prompt? Here's how you can do that. So let's say I want to send an email to my team, encouraging them to participate in our team building event. To get the perfect prompt, I could ask ChatGPT, write five perfect ChatGPT prompts that will really show off the power of ChatGPT. Focus the prompts around writing an email to my team, encouraging them to participate in our team building event. Before you write anything, ask me questions until you're sure you can create optimal prompts. It will usually come back with some questions about the topic, in this case, about the purpose, dates, and locations, and other useful information. Now, after I provide my answers, so for example, for any particular incentives or benefits, I've put nice dinner, nice breakfast, no work. Then I send this off and it creates five possible prompts for me. Now, these are prompts that will help me get the best reply. So one is draft an email to your creative team, encouraging them to join a special team building event. Mention the importance of taking a break from work. Another one is compose an email, inviting your team to a casual and fun team building event. Stress the importance of building strong relationships within the group and the opportunity for a nice dinner. Okay, so I like number three better. I'm just going to tell it to use it. Now, it just provides me with the prompt, but I actually want it to run it. So now do it. It starts writing the email. Now we can see it has a nice subject. The tone is soft and casual and it's highlighting the bonding and relationships, right? So we can see it's sprinkled in different places, like we can share stories, laughter and delicious food. We'll have great breakfast. There's no work, no deadlines. So it's a very customized email. Now compare this to a case where I don't optimize the prompt. So I tell it to write an email to my team to participate in our team building event. It's no surprise 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 output, but you can also take this self-prompting a step further. So if we go back to the step where we got the different prompts, we could ask it why a prompt would work well. It gives me detailed information about the reasons it thinks this prompt is effective, but I'm not so sure. So I'm going to ask it, which prompt do you find the best? It tells me that prompt three effectively combines the key elements are provided. So it could work well in my case, which it actually did. Often when you ask chatGBT to write something, the reply can be rather long. So one way to avoid this is to tell it from the beginning to stick to a specific word count. Now, if this is something that you want in every single reply, you can add it to your custom settings. If not, you can add it to your prompt. So for example, we want to know the advantages of using XLOOKUP over VLOOKUP in Excel. I'm going to add that the maximum length of the text should be 500 words. A few moments later. Okay, so let's double check. I'll copy this, go to a new page, type in word.new to open a blank Word document in the browser and paste in the text. We can see down here that we have 469 words. Now, another alternative is to tell it to reduce the length of a text that it already gave you. So a good prompt for that is now say the same thing more concise and briefer using only 60% as many words or whatever percentage you need. You could try cutting it down even more step-by-step until you get the crispness that you like. Your audience is going to be thankful for it. Specify the output format. ChatGPT has many different output formats, not just plain text. So for example, you can tell it to give you the response in a table format. Let's say create a table with the winners of the FIFA World Cups between 1990 and 2018. The headings should be year, winner and runners up. So we get a table. We can just highlight the content, use the shortcut Control C to copy it, move over to an Excel sheet and paste the table with Control V. Now, alternatively, you can tell it to output the table as CSV. Then all you need to do is to copy the code from here and paste it into a text editor and then save it as a CSV file extension. Now, if you need this, let's say for your website, you could output as HTML. Now, I'm just going to test this out. So I'm going to grab this code and paste it on our site in an HTML editor. Then when I go to preview, I can see the table, but it doesn't look really nice. I'd rather have borders and spacing. So let's improve the prompt and ask it to add the borders and spacing. Later that night. Now, when I replace the code, I have a table that's a lot easier to read, right? So you can also output in different formats like JSON or XML. Or if you need it as a pandas data frame, you can do that as well. Just give it a try. So these are some tips to get the most out of chatGBT or any large language model AI actually. It really comes down to the old principle, garbage in, garbage out. Keep this in mind and you'll definitely make better use of these new tools. I hope you find this helpful. Do subscribe if you aren't subscribed yet. And I'm going to catch you in the next video.