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.
GPT is at lease a couple months out-of-date. Perplexity is real time.
GPT4 has some cool things, a link reader, so that Instead of switching between websites, scrolling, selecting, cutting, and pasting content into a GPT query, with GPT4 you can paste a URL/s into the prompt. GPT4 will consider the content behind the URL when answering.
But unless you give an RSS feed with dates, the information will be a couple of months old. So if you want to answer a question such as, what have been the most recent media sales, you are not going to get the most recent. With Perplexity, you will.
To avoid most hallucinations and copyright issues, feed your own data in.
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.
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.