How to Make ChatGPT Prompts Work for You

ChatGPT is a form of artificial intelligence trained to answer users’ questions in a chat-like manner. Find out more about ChatGPT and how to prompt it to optimise the answers you need.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a chatbot that allows you to interact with an artificial intelligence interface in a chat-like way to create a dialogue of responses to your questions. It can talk to you in a way that sounds like natural language to develop answers to simple prompts like a question or those that are more complex, such as asking it to write an essay or a fictional story, helping you brainstorm ideas, or translating from one language to another.

OpenAI is the AI research and deployment company that created ChatGPT. Its interface allows you to ask questions easily to get a response from the website’s artificial intelligence software.

To try different options if you prefer another app instead of ChatGPT, explore other artificial intelligence apps, such as Bard by Google or Microsoft’s Bing Chat.

How can you tailor ChatGPT prompts to work for you?

Optimising your interactions with ChatGPT by knowing which questions to ask or how to ask them will help you get the most out of the chatbot’s responses. Prompts should be clear to get the best information from ChatGPT, and you’ll want to include as much information as possible to focus the AI interface on returning relevant information for your query.

You’ll also want to consider important pieces for the ChatGPT interface's answer. Perhaps you’ll want to include the type of audience the response addresses, the context around the question you’re asking, or how long you want the response to be.

ChatGPT prompts to get you started

The best way to get the desired results is to ask good questions or give clear statements from ChatGPT to elicit the response you would like from the artificial intelligence program for things such as ChatGPT prompts for business, school, or personal help. Here are some beginnings for prompts that can help you focus your question to ensure you succeed at getting the answers you’re looking for.

Tell me the best or worst…

ChatGPT helps generate responses to questions, but it still needs guardrails sometimes to focus its responses.

Try prompts like “Tell me what the best restaurants are in [city]” or “What are the worst sales tactics that I should avoid?”

These prompts can narrow ChatGPT's focus and give you a helpful response. You can refine your prompt by asking for the type of restaurant or food you prefer and specifying the industry, customer base, or products in your sales role.

Write me a…

One way to use ChatGPT is to brainstorm ideas you can build on. The ChatGPT response can give you a starting point for the next steps in an idea.

You can prompt ChatGPT with “Write me a sales pitch for [my product]” or “Write me an email to welcome new customers.”

It’s important to review what ChatGPT generates as you may not be able to use the direct responses from ChatGPT, but it can give you a good starting point for your work.

Act like…

ChatGPT can pretend to be someone else and assume that person's role when it responds to your query.

These types of prompts can help you compare different points of view of various kinds of people so you can get a better handle on a particular subject or how a person will react.

Try a prompt like “Pretend you’re a journalist and ask me about [my company]” to prepare for a media interview. You could also ask, “Act like a manager responding to [this customer complaint],” to get ideas on responding to client issues.

Help me…

You might know where you’re starting, but you need a little boost from ChatGPT to move you along.

Ask ChatGPT to help you with a project that requires further steps. Try prompts like “Help me create a plan for my new business” or “Help me find sources for my essay.”

The “Help me” prompt can build on a base you already have or the goal you’ve already set to keep you on track and develop tasks that can push you forward.

Review my…

You can also ask ChatGPT to review your work and give you feedback that you may find helpful in refining a sales pitch or strengthening your resume.

Give ChatGPT prompts like “Review my resume for a computer programmer position.” You can also be more specific with your prompt, such as “Can you edit my essay for grammar and tone?”

These prompts can review your work and suggest improvements as a stand-in for a human looking over your work when you only have access to a computer to review.

ChatGPT prompt limits

ChatGPT can be a helpful tool in your professional or personal life, but there are some limits you need to be aware of before using it.

For example, one of ChatGPT's most significant issues is “hallucinations,” which cause it to generate answers that are fabrications or factually incorrect. You have to independently fact-check any answers ChatGPT generates to confirm their authenticity, particularly when you pass the information along as factual.

ChatGPT also has limits regarding what it can create for you. The app is good at responding to a prompt with typical written responses such as natural language responses. Questions about coding languages also work in ChatGPT. The app, however, doesn’t do as well with math, so that may be a topic you want to avoid when using the ChatGPT.

ChatGPT is also based on a data set that goes up to 2021, so it doesn’t have the most up-to-date information on topics you may ask about.

It also can’t connect to the internet, so you won’t be able to ask it to search for results the way you can ask a typical search engine for information.

ChatGPT is programmed to respond to questions that elicit answers with educational and informative value. Because of this, it is also programmed to not respond to inappropriate or harmful queries, advice on politics or investments, or answer questions containing confidential or proprietary information.

Getting started with Coursera

You can learn more about ChatGPT and how you can make it work for you on Coursera.

Check out ChatGPT for Beginners: Save Time With Microsoft Excel on the Coursera Project Network to learn how to make ChatGPT work with Excel to help you generate data for different projects.

Look into Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT through Vanderbilt University of Coursera to learn more about prompts. The course includes information on writing effective prompts that can maximise your productivity and help you better create ChatGPT prompts that work for you.