The day before New Year's Eve, and the one-sentence fix for tone

There isn't an AI story for December 30, 2022. It was a Friday, the last working day of the year for a lot of people, and the record is quiet. ChatGPT had been out for exactly a month, since November 30 according to Wikipedia.

What people were writing that day is easy to guess, though. Year-end notes to a team. Thank-you emails to clients. A message to the neighbors about the shared driveway. Lots of short pieces where the tone matters more than the content.

And tone is where chatbots most often miss.

"Make it friendly"

Here's how most people ask for tone: they add an adjective. Make it friendly. Make it professional. Make it casual but not too casual.

The model does its best. But "friendly" to a chatbot tends to mean exclamation points and phrases like "I hope this finds you well!" "Professional" tends to mean stiff. You end up adding more adjectives to correct the first ones ("friendly but not cheesy, professional but warm") and the result gets blurrier each round.

The problem is that adjectives are vague. Your "casual" and the model's "casual" are different. There are a thousand ways to be friendly, and with nothing else to go on, it picks the most common one.

Show, don't describe

The fix is to stop describing the tone and start showing it. Write one sentence (two at most) the way you want the whole piece to sound, and tell the model to match it.

Before:
Write a year-end thank-you note to my team. Make it warm
but not cheesy, and professional.

After:
Write a short year-end thank-you note to my team of six.
Match the tone of this sentence, which is how I usually
write to them: "Rough quarter, but you all kept the lights
on and nobody threw a laptop, which I'm counting as a win."
Mention the warehouse move in October and that everyone gets
the 2nd off. Under 120 words.

That one sample sentence carries a lot. It's dry. It's a little funny. It uses plain words and admits things were hard. No adjective list could pack all of that in, and the model will pick up on every piece of it.