What No One Ever Tells You About AI
You may not be a prompt engineer, but if you don’t need GPT to find companionship, create world peace, or hack an election, don’t worry.
What AI is good for at media companies is step-saving and redeploying owned content. But what it may be best for is mimicking your voice.
Here’s what you need to know that nobody tells you:
Nobody tells you anything.
Don’t take it personally. AI is only about 19 months old as of October, 2024, so a lot of experimenting is going on, and there are just not a lot of experts.
Check if the AI tool is real time, if taking information from the internet
To avoid AI hallucinations, the most experienced publishers (who’ve been at it, say, a couple of months) feed content into the platform and isue a prompt for that content. But to get ideas, strategies, a starting point for stories such as “Top Bike Events in Nebraska” or check if you’ve missed a lead, prompts that pull from the internet are super useful.
Just keep in mind that not all tools are real times, so data returned that was accurate at some point can be out-of-date.
As of this date, Perplexity, uses real time connection to the internet. Claude and ChatGPT4 do not.
Any of this may chane by the time you read this, so Google first. But keep in mind, that without realtime, unless you give a specific RSS feed with dates, the information you are looking up will be at least a couple of months old or even more.
GPT4 will ingest information behind a URL with its built-in link reader. That’s why most AI developers currently solving media problems use GPT4 to do it. You can structure a proposal or strategy, but it may not deliver real time information for, say, recent sales.
If you need to pull information from a date range for a Weekend newsletter, GPT4’s link reader can do that if you use the RSS feed URL – any URL plus /feed such as nichepublisher.com/feed – in the prompt and the desired date range.
Claude is better for writing
We found that Claude is better for writing documents. Go to Claude projects and input notes, data, other articles. Then feed it a prompt and it will create from that data set.
Ask for directions.
Yep. Our next “aha” came in a moment of frustration. We wanted GPT4 to “remove production notes and subheads” from an audio script. It would not.
“Well, what should I put in the prompt to do this?” It suggested adding the phrase “without unspoken elements like segment titles” to the prompt. That worked. It’s pretty good about telling you how to construct a query when asked.
You can actually ask GPT to write the prompt for you and give an example of what you want it to do. Yes!!!
There is a limit to your questions.
Finally, GPT4, our hero, will boot you off after 40 questions in 3 hours, which is surprisingly easy to accomplish.
So, if you are bumped at 9 a.m., it will not let you back on until noon. Nice to know!
In short, don’t try to replace writers – or yourself. Focus on cutting steps in post-content creation – write once publish everywhere, and training GPT4 to think like you, leaving the tab open.
Train bit by bit in a conversation. Pay for ChatGPT4. Always discloses if you were helped, and don’t get sucked into prompt-building on a deadline.
Go to basic prompt strategies to learn more.
ChatGPT4 apps can replace multiple paid AI Tools
If you go to Chat GPT, and GPTs in middle of the left navigation, it will return all of the apps that GPT 4 has built or partnered with. If they have partnered, you can often drop your license fee for that company, as it is already included in the $20 paid version of GPT4. One publisher who is a heavy AI user was able to cancel paid licenses for 9 other tools. So it’s worth checking out what there. It changes weekly, but you can block your schedule, create visuals, sort data and more, without paying for additional tools.