How to Write AI Prompts That Actually Work (Step-by-Step)

Alright, so ever since ChatGPT came out, it's like AI and LLMs have completely just changed the world. Now, when these models first hit the scene, they weren't really all that useful for most everyday tasks. Let's be real, for most tasks, these models were basically useless. But here's the thing. Since that point, all of these models have only gotten better and better. And if you can learn to write an effective prompt, then you can automate pretty much any task with AI right now. like any task that you want. But that's the key. You have to write an effective prompt and that's where the magic happens. And I'm going to show you a bunch of different ways that I personally use AI to automate different things in my own work. But first let me rant a bit about how most people use AI. Most people, they just open up ChatGPT, type out like two sentences and then they expect some AGI level output. They think the AI is just going to give them the world. The problem with those two sentence prompts is that you're leaving out a massive amount of context and then the AI, it has to fill in all those blanks itself. And guess what? It's not gonna give you the exact output you were hoping for. It just won't. The prompts I'm writing these days are usually at least a couple thousand words long. They're super detailed, they've I've got tons of examples of what the correct output looks like and all the context and other information that the AI needs to actually nail the task. So with all that being said we just going to follow a really simple step process to automate literally any task with AI Now I want this to be a beginner friendly video so we not going to talk too much about the underlying technology behind LLMs We just going to discuss a simple framework that you can use to start automating your work with AI. First up you gotta figure out what task you actually want to automate. This one's kind of obvious, you need to know what you want to automate before you automate it. Next you need to break that task down into super simple, highly detailed instructions. Think like you're teaching a complete beginner, someone who knows absolutely nothing, and you're teaching them how to perform this task. Every single tiny step, you need to include that in your prompt. Then add some example inputs and outputs. This is crucial because it teaches the AI how to produce the correct output. It also shows the AI what the output format should be. Of course, you can always just specify that yourself, like explicitly just say i want my output to look like this and speaking of format if you need your output in a very specific format like json csv or xml or something like that then make sure you mention that in your prompt as well don't leave this to chance finally you gotta test your prompt you test the output that the ai gives you and then you just iteratively and continually refine that that prompt over time. You keep tweaking it, making it better and better, and it keeps giving you increasingly more awesome output. So it's a process of iteration, and we don't expect to have the perfect prompt right from the start. So let me show you an example. This is a prompt I actually created recently It a prompt to generate viral video titles and it requires a PDF video script attached So let just walk through this together First I give the AI a role. I tell it that it's an expert at generating viral video titles. I assign it a job essentially. Then I tell it that the input is going to be given in a PDF file so it knows to expect an upload. and I tell it to generate titles based on 15 specific principles that I described later in the prompt. These 15 principles by the way these are my instructions on how to generate viral video titles. Do you see how different this is from how most people use AI? Think about it. If I just opened up chat GPT and wrote a two-sentence prompt like generate a bunch of video titles it would give me some pretty mediocre results like some really bland and boring generic results right? But instead, if I actually explain to it how to generate video titles with really detailed instructions, then the output I get is just so much higher quality, right? It's the difference between night and day. So continuing on, next I tell it the output format, how exactly I want the AI's output to look. It should be 10 video titles ordered from best to worst. Super clear. And here's a big one. There should be no other text in the output other than just the video titles. Oftentimes you'll see AI will just put some pointless text at the start or at the end of the message. And it will be something like, absolutely I'll do this task for you based on this XYZ process that you told me or something like that. And at the end of the output they would say something like would you like to do XYZ other thing as well I don want any of that i just want the titles so i make sure that the ai knows that and finally now i provided with all the detailed instructions on how to actually perform this task and perform it well and this is what makes a prompt good this is the meat of it now i'm actually going to test this out right now live with you watching i'm going to use the exact same video script that i wrote for this video, the one you're currently watching. I'll paste this prompt into GPT, then I'll upload a PDF of this video's script, and then let's just see what kind of titles it gives us. Alright, so you can see, it gives us some pretty decent options here. And if you want, you could just use one of these titles directly, but what I like to do is use these titles as inspiration, you know, to help me come up with even better titles myself. It's a starting point. But, that's beside the point really. Anyway, that's how you can literally automate any task that you want with AI. I mean, this used to be impossible when these models first came out. They just weren't good enough. But now, right now, the current models that we have on GPT, on Cloud, on Grok are absolutely insane. The level of quality in their output is absolutely insane. But obviously, that depends on the prompt that you give it. And if you can just learn to write a great prompt you can automate pretty much anything at all anyway that's all for this video if you liked it press like if you want to subscribe press subscribe and if you want to see my paid stuff if you want to work with me or hire me for a project or something like that check out my website the link is in the description thanks for watching bye