Master the Perfect ChatGPT Prompt Formula (in just 8 minutes)!

Summary

In this video, Jeff Su presents an ultimate formula for mastering prompts with ChatGPT and Google Bard, focusing on six key components: task, context, exemplars, persona, format, and tone. Through a structured approach, Jeff explains how each component contributes to generating high-quality outputs, emphasizing the order of importance among them. He provides practical examples and tips for effectively utilizing these components, ensuring that viewers learn to craft precise and productive prompts. The video promises a progression from mere knowledge to professional expertise in prompting skills, making it essential for anyone keen on utilizing AI tools efficiently.

Highlights

• Master the ultimate formula for ChatGPT and Google Bard prompts! ✨
• Understand the importance of task, context, exemplars, persona, format, and tone. 📚
• Learn why task is the most important element in prompts. 🏆
• See how context provides depth to your task. 🌍
• Exemplars can drastically improve output quality by providing examples. 📈
• Discover how the persona component changes your AI interaction. 🦸
• Visualize your desired output format for clarity. 📊
• Setting the right tone can make a big difference. 🎶

Key Takeaways

• Master the art of prompting in ChatGPT and Google Bard with six essential components! 🎯
• Learn the hierarchy of prompt elements: task, context, exemplars, persona, format, and tone. 🔝
• Practical examples show how each component improves the quality of AI-generated outputs. 💡
• No need for all six elements in every prompt; know what's vital! ⚖️
• Persona lets you name specific individuals or fictional characters for customized results. 👥

Overview

Jeff Su, a tech professional, shares his formula for perfecting prompts with ChatGPT and Google Bard. He highlights that while prompting might seem intimidating, understanding and applying six core components can drastically enhance the quality of AI responses. These components—task, context, exemplars, persona, format, and tone—are likened to a checklist that can be tailored depending on the complexity and requirements of the prompt.

Each aspect of the prompt is crucial. The task defines the core action requested from the AI, while context provides necessary details to ground the request. Exemplars serve as models or frameworks to improve output, and persona alters the AI's role or perspective. Format visualization ensures outputs are practically applicable, and the tone sets the emotional or formal atmosphere.

The video emphasizes the adaptability of this formula, noting that not all components are compulsory but using them effectively elevates prompt results. By integrating these techniques, users can transition from simply knowing about prompting to expertly wielding it for varied tasks, from business reports to creative tasks. Jeff encourages viewers to tune in for deeper insight in future videos.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction and Importance of Prompting In the introduction, the importance of mastering prompting on platforms like ChatGPT and Google Bard is emphasized. The speaker, Jeff, highlights that while prompting is a crucial skill, many may not understand why some prompts generate more useful outputs than others. Jeff shares his own journey of spending hundreds of hours learning and applying prompt engineering to improve his skills.
• 00:30 - 01:00: Six Building Blocks of a Good Prompt In this chapter, the focus is on identifying and understanding the six essential building blocks for crafting a good prompt. These include task, context, exemplars, persona, format, and tone. The chapter emphasizes that not only is it important to recognize these components, but it's also crucial to understand their order of importance. An example is given to illustrate how these elements integrate into a prompt structure, specifically by transforming a basic request into a more refined and targeted query.
• 01:00 - 02:00: Task and Context Components The chapter discusses the hierarchy of importance between task and context in prompt formulation. It explains that while a task can stand alone to produce meaningful output, context alone is ineffective without a task. The chapter stresses the necessity of including a task in prompts and suggests using context, exemplars, and, optionally, persona, format, and tone. It proposes a mental checklist for crafting prompts to ensure all necessary elements are included.
• 02:00 - 02:30: Exemplars, Persona, and Format Components The chapter discusses the essential components for writing effective prompts. It emphasizes the importance of including just enough relevant information and notes that not all six components are necessary for every prompt. The chapter advises beginning the task sentence with an action verb such as 'generate,' 'give,' 'write,' or 'analyze,' and clearly defining the end goal. This could be a straightforward task like generating a training program or a more involved multi-step task.
• 02:30 - 03:30: Tone Component and Comprehensive Prompt Example In this chapter, the focus is on processing hundreds of user feedbacks by extracting the top three takeaways and categorizing the feedback according to the responsible teams. The challenge of providing the right context is also discussed, recognizing its complexity due to the infinite information one could potentially provide. The chapter offers three guiding questions to ensure adequate context is given: understanding the user's background, defining what success looks like, and considering the user's environment.
• 03:30 - 04:00: Conclusion and Outro The chapter provides guidance on how to achieve a specific fitness goal: a 70kg male aiming to gain 5kg of muscle over three months with a limited gym schedule of two one-hour sessions per week. It emphasizes the importance of providing enough information to guide ChatGPT effectively in creating a tailored training program. Additionally, it touches on prioritizing muscle groups that enhance appearance for social media, and notes the support from viewers, despite the video not being sponsored.

Master the Perfect ChatGPT Prompt Formula (in just 8 minutes)! Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 I don't usually overhype myself but in this video we're going over the only formula you will ever need to master prompting on chat BT and Google bard so let's get started hey friends welcome back to channel if you're new here my name is Jeff I work full-time in Tech and if you're anything like me a couple months ago you know prompting is an important skill to learn but you're not exactly sure why some prompts generate outputs that are super generic While others give you precisely what you're looking for since then I've spent hundreds of hours taking prompt engineering courses and applying what
• 00:30 - 01:00 I've learned in my daily life and so in this video I'm sharing these six building blocks that make up a good prompt so that you can use this formula to consistently generate high quality outputs first it's critical to not only know what the six components are task context exemplars Persona format and tone but also know that there's an order of importance to these six components to show you what I mean let's use this simple example I'm a 70kg male give me a 3-month training program the first part is context followed by the task the
• 01:00 - 01:30 reason why the task is higher up in the formula hierarchy is if we just input the task without the context there's still some sort of meaningful output but if we just give Chachi PT the context nothing really happens put another way it's mandatory to have a task in your prompt it's important to include relevant context and exemplars and it's nice to have Persona format and tone when you think of writing your prompt go down this mental checklist so this formula will act as a constant reminder
• 01:30 - 02:00 for you to include just enough relevant information when writing prompts and as you'll see in this next part you do not need all six components in every prompt to have a good output now let's break down each building block with specific examples starting with the task the rule of thumb is to always start the task sentence with an action verb generate give write analyze Etc and clearly articulate what your end goal is it could be one simple task like generating a three-month training program or a complex three-step task like analyzing
• 02:00 - 02:30 hundreds of user feedback sharing the top three takeaways and categorizing the feedback based on the team responsible for following off the second component context is the trickiest to get right because technically there's an infinite amount of information you can give so I found asking myself these three questions to be super helpful in coming up with just enough information to get a good result from Chachi BT first what's the user's background second what do success look like and third what environment are they in back to the
• 02:30 - 03:00 workout example we now have I'm a 70kg male looking to put on 5 kg of muscle mass over the next 3 months I only have time to go to the gym twice a week and for 1 hour each session give me a 3month training program to follow could I have added more background information of course only prioritize the muscle groups that make me look good at Instagram but the key to staying productive with chat gbtm Bard is giving just enough information to constrain the endless possibilities by the way although this video is not sponsored it is supported by those of you you who
• 03:00 - 03:30 subscribe to my paid positivity newsletter on Google workspace tips Link in the description to learn more moving over to the exemplars component it's just a fancy way of saying examples basically all the research on large language models llms have shown that including examples within the prompt drastically improves the quality of the output starting with a simple example this is a py written bullet point from a resume we can now ask chat GPT to rewrite this bullet point using this structure I accomplish X by to measure y
• 03:30 - 04:00 that resulted in Z which is actually best practice by the way so actually do this in your resume for example I lowered Hospital mortality rate by 10% by educating nurses in new protocols which translates to 200 lives saved per year here's a slightly more complicated example for interview prep based on my own resume write me an answer to the interview question what's your biggest weakness use the star answer framework situation task action and results here instead of using a full-blown interview answer as an example which would be Overkill the star framework acts as an
• 04:00 - 04:30 example structure for chat gbt to follow last example let's say you need to write a job description you give some context around the opening and ask chat apt to reference an existing job description if I use this one I found on LinkedIn the output will follow the same formatting and use the same professional hre language saving me a bunch of time main takeaway here exemplars are not necessary for every prompt but including a relevant example or framework will greatly improve the quality of your output moving along the Persona
• 04:30 - 05:00 component is basically who you want cha PT and bar to be and the pro tip here is to think of someone you wish you had instant access to with the task you're facing if you injured yourself working out that person might be a physical therapist with experience helping athletes recover if you're a jobseeker that person might be a recruiter or Hing manager if you're working on a creative brief that person might be a senior product marketing manager who's great at storytelling Pro tip you can also name specific individuals but I found the results to be good only when they're
• 05:00 - 05:30 famous enough like Warren Buffett Steve Jobs Jeff Sue by the way I just have to share this we have a team offsite with a superheroes theme so I asked Chach PT to draft an email from Batman and it even included things like please let Alfred know and signed off as The Dark Knight um so fictional characters work as well and I'm actually going to use this the fifth component format the pro tip here is to literally close your eyes and visualize how exactly you want the end result to look like a million likes on my thir bomb Instagram photo damn it
• 05:30 - 06:00 didn't work back to the user feedback example I don't want to read each sentence so I asked chachy BT to take all the feedback and output a table with three headers the original feedback the team responsible for following up and priority and now I can copy this directly and paste it into a Google sheet store by priority and filter by team other common formats include emails bullet points and code blocks but the one I found to be the most useful as a full-time working professional is paragraphs and and markdown for example
• 06:00 - 06:30 I just received a lengthy industry report from my director first give me the three key takeaways then summarize based on topic use H2 as section headers here is the report Pro tip whenever I use chash gbt to proofread any document I specify that all changes need to be bolded so I can easily see exactly what has been changed let's quickly go through the last component tone before we put all this together in one example the good news is tone is easy to understand use a casual or formal tone of voice give me a witty output uh show
• 06:30 - 07:00 enthusiasm sound pessimistic the bad news is we're usually not very good at recalling the thousands of potential adjectives and adverbs at a moment's notice so here's a pro tip tell tra BT the feeling you're going for for example I'm writing an email to a team I haven't worked with before and I want to be taken seriously without coming off as too stuck up and cringey can you please give me a list of five tone keywords I can include in a prompt for chbt and look now in the actual prompt I can say
• 07:00 - 07:30 use clear and concise language and write in a friendly yet confident tone putting all this together let's look at this comprehensive prompt you are a senior product marketing manager at Apple Persona and you have just unveiled the latest Apple product in collaboration with Tesla the Apple car and received 12,000 pre-orders which is 200% higher than Target context write an email to your boss Tim cookie sharing this positive news task and format the email should include a tldr tool long didn't
• 07:30 - 08:00 read section project background why this product came into existence business results section quantifiable business metrics and end with a section thanking the product and Engineering teams example structure use clear and concise language and write in a confident yet friendly tone tone note that if I had an existing email to reference I could delete the instructions around the structure and simply tell chbt the email should follow the exact same format as the one I will share below and paste the
• 08:00 - 08:30 email from before by the way you can compare the output from this prompt to that of a simpler prompt I just launched a new product the Apple car I received 12,000 pre-orders please run an email to my boss with this update there's a pretty big difference in terms of how generic and usable the end result is now that you know the basics of prompting my next video is going to take you from beginner to Pro so make sure you're subscribed for that check out my top five CH gbt productivity tips for work see you on the next video in the meantime have a great one