Final Thoughts: AI Is a Tool, Not a Mind Reader
Eric Baerren, UCOMM:
If you’re getting boring or generic responses, it’s because you’re giving AI boring or generic prompts.
✅ Give it structure (frameworks, templates)
✅ Refine responses (don’t accept the first answer)
✅ Force it to take a side (debate-style prompts)
AI isn’t magic. It’s just really good at following instructions. So if your results suck, change the instructions.
My recommendation is that you start by picking an AI that suits your style and the kind of work you want it to do. Experiment with different AI companies. Most of them offer different models that can do different things, but I've found that all of one company's models communicates pretty similarly. Find one you feel comfortable with.
And, again, I recommend that you not use it to write news stories. Not only does AI still have a hallucination problem, but if you write with search optimization in mind ... Google and other search engines are learning to spot AI writing and are downgrading AI writing in search results.
Be very specific in how you prompt. As in, you should start your first prompt telling the AI what its job is (i.e. "You are a copy editor.). Being very specific in what you tell it to do will minimize hallucinations (i.e. AI making things up). "You are a copy editor. You will read a news story that I have written for the public relations team at Central Michigan University. You will double check spelling based on American usage, grammar and style according to the latest guidance from the Associated Press. You will produce a short report when you have finished that will flag any errors or potentially errors in proper name spelling."
Read its work product very carefully and reread what you've written, assuming that your AI missed something. Don't just assume that the AI has gotten it right. Provide clear feedback to the AI if it made a mistake. Refine your prompt to incorporate that feedback. You might need to write a very, very long prompt to get it to do something basic. Once you have that prompt hammered out, however, you can copy and paste it every time you need to do the task.
My final recommendation is to stay current on AI developments. I use OpenAI (ChatGPT) for my work, and it's become necessary to get much more specific in how prompts are written for the later models than the earlier.