Like a Diary, not a Machine—AI as a Creative and Strategic Partner
Part 1 of our 20 part series
Welcome to AI as a Creative and Strategic Partner—Funmentum™ Style!🎉🎉🎉
Our new series on harnessing Generative AI like Chat GPT, Copilot, Gemini, etc. for both fun and breakthrough results. Many people use GenAI for low level tasks like summarizing meeting notes, writing simple emails, researching industry trends, etc.
This series is focused on the opposite—Gen AI is strongest as a high level thought partner. Not replacing you or doing your work in an average/generic way, rather pushing your thinking as a strategic challenger, creative muse, and feedback focuser. All to create higher quality work, which is approved faster, with less and time/effort. And it’s a lot of fun!
Make sure to subscribe and follow along—new posts every Friday at 5am PT/8am ET for the next 19 weeks!
Chapter 1 of 4: Mindset is the Magic
For the first 5 posts, we’ll focus on the right mindset for working with AI. Namely, way more context and back and forth iteration than you expect.
#1: Like a Diary, not a Machine
Having a “prompt pack” can be a helpful way to start out, but pretty quickly starts to limit you, as it models the wrong behavior. When I’m working with GenAI, I am much messier and longer than a tidy prompt saved somewhere.
When you treat GenAI like a diary, it’s all about spilling the beans. Dump your messy notes, your half-formed ideas, your constraints, your hopes, your random data points—everything. It’s not supposed to be linear, and as you work it out, you will discover new insights.
Ironically, the more human you sound (rambling, uncertain, opinionated), the more helpful the AI becomes. You are giving it way more material to work with. Misspellings, poor grammar, etc. are totally cool, just push push push.
❌Bad Example - like a Machine 🛠️
Act as a marketing consultant for a new boutique fitness brand aimed at busy professionals who love quick, intense workouts. Please give me 3 bold social media ideas that highlight our fun, supportive community vibe.
This is not actually that bad, way better than many prompts. It gives the AI a specific role to play, it specifies an audience, the brand angle, and has a clear request. But I want more for you, as this is just👏too👏short👏.
✅Good Example - like a Diary 📝
Okay, throwing this all out there because I need some help shaping a social media campaign. Right now, it’s just a bunch of scattered thoughts in my head.
It’s for FitSpark, a boutique fitness brand that does high-intensity, 30-minute workouts—cardio + strength, no fluff. We’re going after busy professionals, 25-40, who want max results, fast, you know like everyone. They love feeling like they’re part of an inside club.
We’ve been running Instagram ads, meh, the engagement is lukewarm. We tried humor, but it kinda flopped—maybe we didn’t hit the right tone? I don’t know. It just didn’t give us the results that we wanted. Maybe we’re just not that funny.
OH so our biggest selling points are…
• 30 min, 400 calories burned, super efficient.
• Community is everything, our members rave about feeling supported, not judged.
• No fluff, all fire—our people want real, intense, but fun workouts.
The campaign needs to scream “work hard, have fun” but in a way that actually stands out, because this kinda sounds like everyone else. I don’t want another fitness brand with stock footage of sweaty people high-fiving.
Stuff I’m thinking about…
• Weird collabs? Maybe partner with something totally unexpected.
• Comedic angle? But in a way that actually lands.
• Something visual? Something punchy? I don’t know, but it needs to grab people.
Constraints are tight budget, limited staff time for content creation, and an audience that’s already drowning in fitness marketing.
So, please act like a seasoned marketing consultant at a global firm. You are bringing your “A game” to wow me, your client, with great ideas that feel both fresh and actionable. Give me 10 initial creative campaign concepts, with a short description under 200 characters. Don’t hold back on quirkiness if you think it might stand out. Thanks in advance—can’t wait to see what you come up with!
This is shorter than a lot of my prompts - I cut it down for brevity’s sake. I also put it in bullets so you could read it - my actual prompts are just a single giant block of text (lol).
The point is that you just give it a LOT of context to work with, way more than you think, and you’re already going to be ahead of the game. There are many other things I’m doing here, such as “act as a seasoned marketing consultant”, “give me 10 ideas”, and more which I’ll cover in subsequent posts.
PRO TIP: I love using🎙️voice-to-text. On Chat GPT it’s this button:
I’ll turn it on and just ramble, let myself wander out loud. Then it turns it into text and I just hit SEND - I don’t even take the time to review it. It’s so much easier than sitting down and trying to type everything out (which I do too).
Remember—treat it like a diary, not a machine.
💡That’s your one thing for this week!
Make sure to subscribe to get the next 19 posts, every Friday morning at 5am PT/8am ET! Let’s make Friday our day to experiment on high level work challenges while growing our AI skills.
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👋Thanks,
Devin McNulty
Co-Founder Funmentum™ Labs
👀👀👀
P.S. I can get your team acting like this—book 15 minutes to pick my brain.
P.P.S. Try Funware Ideator for free, the world’s first ever automatic brainstorm, powered by AI (of course)!
🦾AI as a Creative and Strategic Partner
As we progress, each post will be linked below for reference.
Chapter 1: Mindset is the Magic
Post #1: Like a Diary, not a Machine (this post!)