12 Tips to Prompt an AI Chatbot

Prompting for the best possible results

Who or what is the audience? Let the AI know just what you are after. Is it about a particular area or region? Who are you asking about? Your kids, grandparents, yourself or someone else of a certain age?

Choose a style: Building on the above, do you want a formal, technical or academic answer from the AI? Or perhaps something more casual or breezy that might be best understood by a grade schooler, a complete novice or a retiree with a minimal technical understanding? You might prompt the AI with something as direct as “explain nanotechnology to a beginner.”

Spell out how the information should be presented — as a bulleted list, paragraphs, etc. — and specify the desired length.

Change the tone. If the AI is helping you write an email, letter or memo to your boss and the tone doesn’t seem quite right, ask it to change it. Make it friendlier, more polite, less intense or, at the other extreme, harsher.

Assign the AI a role, persona and/or profession. Let the AI play a part, suggests Mike Reilley, founder of the Journalist's Toolbox online resource, who says, “Role-play helps the AI tool think through the process better.” He offers this example: “You are an environmentalist researching AI’s impact on water used in Oregon waterways to cool data centers. …”

Keep the conversation going. Talk to the AI as if it were a person. “Don’t be afraid to spread the task over several prompts,” Reilley adds. “In other words, you should not feel compelled to front-load it with too much detail.

Add constraints and requirements. Don’t just tell it what you want it to do; tell it what it can’t do. Researchers at Harvard suggest employing “do” and “don’t” to improve results. If you are seeking help preparing a meal, for example, specify the foods or ingredients you want to include, as well as those you do not.

Building on the prior role-play idea, supply additional context. Maybe you want that recipe to come from an "award-winning chef.” Or with input from a personal trainer. Such a prompt might read something like, “Create a recipe that will help me refuel after my workout. Do not include tomatoes, chicken or carbs … or any ingredients containing wheat.”

Provide reference materials to assist the AI, but be cautious. You might include links to books, articles, websites and so on. But you’re warned not to reveal any personal details in your reference materials, nor provide copyrighted works that you then want to rewrite and present as your own.

Rewrite the prompt. If you’re not getting the results you want, try again. Sometimes you can click or tap a regenerate button, and sometimes you can get help from third-party software browser plug-ins that can help polish a prompt, says Reilley, who lists both free and paid versions of such tools on his site.

Use the AI to coach you. When an insurance company denied coverage for her 98-year-old mother with dementia, Marie O’Hara turned to ChatGPT for help. “I had AI coach me through that whole appeal process,” says the career development counselor at a community college in the Chicago suburbs. O’Hara copied and pasted language from her mom’s long-term care policy into ChatGPT and asked it to tell her “how to phrase this appeal. It came up with long-term memory, short-term memory struggles and executive functioning … examples,” O’Hara says. She included relevant examples in her pushback, and the appeal was successful.

Ask the AI itself for assistance writing the prompt. If you’re stuck crafting a decent prompt, the Harvard researchers recommend adding this line to the end of your prompt: “Tell me what else you need to do to this.”

Image prompting. You can also use prompts to generate pictures and videos that match a specific vibe or genre you have in mind. Much of the same advice that applies to prompting chatbots also applies to image prompting. In other words, be as specific as you can.

Microsoft advises Copilot users to employ starter words along the lines of “Draw a detailed sketch of…” or “Generate an impressionist portrait of….”

Include instructions about the lighting, framing, colors, depth of field or other styles. Perhaps you are looking for cartoon effects or images that resemble stock photography? Tell the AI.

If you’re not satisfied with the AI’s output, you can request modifications or ask it to try again from scratch.

But don’t be too general. “Draw a picture of a dog” is probably too broad. Instead, describe the canine in more detail. What is its breed? Describe the location and what it is doing. Add the dog’s mood: playful, sad, menacing and so on.

Don’t take what the AI generates as gospel. This isn’t so much how to prompt an AI as how to interpret what it spits out. Though AIs are getting smarter, they still get things wrong or, in geek parlance, “hallucinate.” Even if AI results sound authoritative, before following any advice or suggestions, always double-check facts, especially if you’re seeking information relating to your health or finances. 

Pay attention to the disclaimers. And be mindful of copyright before publishing anything that an AI generates​​