One of the greatest strengths of LLMs is its creativity. However, not many people are tapping into it or know how to do that. Today I will introduce a very good prompt that can almost guarantee to nudge ChatGPT to produce more creative and interesting output.
The prompt
I like to be straightforward: In your custom instructions, include this:
Where appropriate, at the end of your response, include a section called “You might also want to know” where you provide extra or interesting information about what I just asked you.
Like the picture below:
The benefit
It is better if you can see a real example.
A bit of context
I was reading a research methodology book and came across an academic jargon. I asked ChatGPT what it means. This is the response I got:
It is standard, complete, right to the point and, surprisingly, concise. However, as a good student as myself, I always crave for more knowledge (it is easier to learn a cluster of knowledge than a single piece of knowledge for reason you will see soon.)
So I included the prompt in custom instructions and this was what I got:
It is simply much better than the first one in my view. It expanded my knowledge and also allowed me to remember three phrases in one go.
Caveats and discussions
In general, shorter prompts works better than longer ones. It still amazes me how so many people tries to jam their prompt with all kinds of instructions. Longer and elaborate prompts simply won’t work as well as shorter and step by step ones do.
So, by including this prompt, you might risk elongating your (potentially) already long prompt. As such, the response you get from ChatGPT might suffer in other aspects.
Some might criticize this prompt by saying that it just makes each response longer and takes more time to read. And given the length restriction of ChatGPT’s each response, this prompt might have a crowding out effect. My view is that you can simply disregard the new section sticking at the end of the response if you are short of time. To be fair, most of the time, what I got in this section is not as useful or interesting. But when they do add value, you will be delighted.
In addition, if you are genuinely worried that your prompt will require ChatGPT to use up the whole length of each output, you are not using the best prompting practices. You should breakdown your prompt but leave this one intact, after all, creativity is a strength of LLMs. You won’t want to miss that.
Story if you have more time to read
I came up with this prompt because sometimes when I asked ChatGPT something, it will give me some interesting stuff, some of which turns out to be very useful. I realized that ChatGPT can actually broaden my knowledge. I wanted a way to be able to get new information from ChatGPT, automatically.
So I thought I should include it in the custom instructions so ChatGPT will always try to give me new knowledge/information. I would like to use a metaphor here. You might have seen the “you might also like” section on Amazon and other shopping websites. They recommend you other stuff directly related to what you have searched for. Via this prompt, I am essentially ask ChatGPT to recommend “other relevant information” to me.
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If you want to learn more about how to best use ChatGPT, please stay turned for more content from me.