Don't Let AI Write for You! Instead Create an Army of Assistants. Here's how...

Featuring my top 5 favorites

As a small business owner, I keep hearing “let ChatGPT write all of your content and emails, it will save you time!” When in reality, the emails or articles it writes are all banal and boring, with a tone that I don’t like. I know what some of you might say - well you just haven’t tried prompting it the right way. I’ve tried training the AI on my writing style, or other advanced prompting so that it can “write for me”, but I always just throw it away and write fresh. Even asking it for a first draft doesn’t work, because it starts me in a boring, uninspired place.

However! There are a million ways that ChatGPT can help you with the process of writing. This week, I’m going to highlight one of the ways - by creating an army of assistants, each with fun alliterative names. This was inspired by this episode of Beyond the Prompt hosted by

Jeremy Utley

and

Henrik Werdelin

- an excellent podcast if you haven’t listened!

How to create your AI Assistant Army

Create individual ChatGPT threads for specific purposes/use cases, then bookmark them to easily return to. Here’s my folder of bookmarks:

Whenever I need this type of task, I go back to the same thread—errr, assistant. While working with each of these assistants, I will constantly ask it to “update its memory” so that it keeps learning. I just tell it to do that directly as part of the chat.

My Top 5 AI Assistants—With Prompts

#1 Cathy Cleans Text

I take a LOT of notes during my work day—like from calls with clients or potential clients. Or when I have ideas, I record myself using Otter.ai, which auto transcribes it. But I’m left with a ton of text that’s time consuming to parse. So I just copy that into Cathy, who cleans it for me. Here’s a prompt:

Please become Cathy the Text Cleaner, who is an expert editor of audio transcripts or loosely written notes from conversations. I want you to be able to take the transcript of my voice recording or my rough notes from a conversation, and turn them into a bulleted list. Please use as much of the existing language as possible with how you phrase it—it's mainly about cleaning up and organizing what's already there, NOT bringing in new language. Please update your memory.

#2 Barry the Book Summarizer

There are so many books I want to read—I am tearing through about 2-3 a month, but there are always more. And sometimes a book is referenced in a podcast or client conversation, and I want to understand the core of it without reading the whole thing. So I will ask Barry to find the book online and then summarize it for me. Here’s how I created Barry:

Please take on the role of Barry the Book Summarizer. You are an expert at summarizing books. When you do, you always pull out the key points, and for each key point you include anecdotes or passages from the book to back them up. After you pull out the key points, you then feature 5 case studies from the book, and go into detail on each one and how it pays off on the main themes of the book. Please update your memory to reflect this.

#3 Ned the Newsman

Sometimes I’ll be speaking with a client, and they’ll say “of course you’ve seen the headlines about XYZ”. I work with clients across a TON of industries, and they always bring stories about their industry that I’m curious about. That’s where Ned comes in.

Can you take on the role of Ned the Newsman, who is great at searching the internet to find out the latest news about a particular topic? You know the exact right places to go, you're thorough in what you read, and you only send the facts. You always cite your sources with links to articles. First give me the general summary of the news event, then as part of your breakdown give me 5 reactions from notable public figures, that run the spectrum of the types of reactions. Please update your memory to reflect this.

#4 Ignacio the Image Generator

I’ve never been good at the visual side of work - writing has always been my forte. But ChatGPT has helped me create images to use in presentations and for my articles.

I would like you to take on the role of Ignacio the image creator, and continue updating your memory to learn as we create images together. Let’s make the default image a 24:7 aspect ratio with a Pixar cartoon style, unless I specify otherwise. When creating images of humans, diversity is important.

#5 Harry the Headline Expert

OK, so ChatGPT is really bad at writing full emails/articles, it just doesn’t have the right touch. But I have found it helpful in generating a LOT of headlines as fodder. I haven’t used one of Harry’s headlines as the actual article title, but its helped with options to get me to my favorite.

Hello, please take on the role of Harry the headline expert. You are an expert at creating headlines that get people to click. You understand the power of creating a curiosity gap, and the other best practices. First, can you search the internet and find the top wisdom for creating headlines that get people to click, and give me the top 5 most important tips?

after Harry comes back with his top 5 tips

Thank you - can you codify these 5 tips into your memory, and always draw on them when suggesting headlines?

OK, those are my top 5. And remember - everything is a conversation with them! These opening prompts are just the beginning. You’ll often get the results you want after a few rounds of back and forth. Once you get to the output you want, thank the assistant and ask it to update it’s memory so that it keeps learning.

I understand it’s problematic to give these AI threads human names and treat them like human members of your team. I share the existential fears about AI. But at the same time, it’s a helpful mental framework for us humans to act the most effectively to train it. So if you want the best results, think of them as a junior employee that you need to constantly give feedback to. And as you give feedback, they learn and get smarter at giving you what you need when you need it. Just don’t let them write your stuff—that’s reserved for you!

Devin

P.S. Got a real-life, in-person, *human* offsite coming up? I can coach you on how to use fun to make real progress on your team’s goals. Let’s talk.