Day three, no headline, and the prompt trick that beats describing

December 2, 2022 was a Friday, and as far as we can tell the record is quiet. We looked for a dated AI event we could stand behind, an announcement or a paper or a post from someone involved, and didn't find one we'd put our name to. So no fake news today. ChatGPT had been out since Wednesday, when OpenAI opened it as a free research preview, and people were spending their Friday poking at it.

That's a good excuse to talk about the most underrated thing you can put in a prompt.

Show, don't describe

When people first sat down with ChatGPT, they described what they wanted. "Write a product description, friendly but professional, not too long, with some bullet points." Every one of those words is fuzzy. How friendly? How long is too long? What goes in the bullets?

An example answers all of it at once. Paste in one thing that looks like what you want, and the model picks up length, rhythm, formatting and tone from it without you naming any of them. I'd go as far as saying one decent example beats a paragraph of adjectives almost every time. It's also the trick beginners skip, because it feels like cheating. It isn't. It's just clearer.

The catch is real, though. Give one example and you'll sometimes get it back nearly word for word with the nouns swapped. Two fixes help. Say what to borrow and what to change. Or give two examples that are different from each other, so the model has to find what they share.

Before and after

Before:
Write a short bio for my website. Make it warm and a bit funny,
but still professional. Not too long.

After:
Write a short bio for my website. Match the length and tone of this
example, but use my details below, not the example's.

Example:
"Dana fixes old bikes for a living and new ones for fun. She's been
running Spoke & Spanner since 2015 and still can't walk past a bent
wheel without stopping."

My details: freelance bookkeeper, 8 years, works with small bakeries
and cafes, likes long walks and terrible puns.

The after version wins because "warm and a bit funny" is now a thing the model can see instead of a guess. Two sentences, one personal detail at the end, a light joke. You didn't have to explain any of that.