Prompt engineers, we were not. But we didn’t need GPT to find companionship, create world peace, or hack an election.

All we wanted to do – and to be able to recommend to other publishers – was how to remove steps in the administrative workflow that bog down writers and, well, me, the publisher of NPB.

What ChatGPT is good at is step-saving while reconfiguring already owned content. And yes, editors and writers still need to edit. The better the prompts, the less editing is required. Prompts are, in fact, repeatable, sometimes, hence the AI Media Library that NichePublisher.biz launched  this year.(Yeah!).

This post is intended to instruct neophyte prompters to learn from mistakes we made so you don’t have to.

Nobody tells you anything

Don’t take it personally. ChatGPT is like the IT guy ten years ago who thought the company would be better off if everyone on staff figured it out for themselves.  Today, NA.  Teams are smaller and smaller, so  we will just give you the goods.

GPT3.5 (free) preserves your prompt history in the sidebar, which GPT4 (paid) does not.  So if you upgrade to GPT4, it is easy to lose a perfect prompt you spent a long time developing so it could be usable repeatedly.  Darn.

Once you upgrade to GPT4, your chat GPT3.5 prompt history is permanently deleted. Whoopsie.

But GPT4 has a link reader, while ChatGPT3 does not. Instead of switching between websites, scrolling, selecting, cutting, and pasting content into a GPT query, paste a URL/s into the prompt. GPT4 will consider the content behind the URL when answering.

For $20 a month, hours of work daily or weekly immediately vanished.

Ask more, but ask differently

If you need to pull information from a date range for, say, a Weekender newsletter, GPT4’s link reader can do that, too.

Include the RSS feed URL  – any URL plus /feed such as nichepublisher.com/feed  – in the prompt and the desired date range.  GPT4 will deliver a result based on those directives.

Don’t bother asking GPT3.5  how to upgrade to get the link reader. It will tell you there is no link reader at any upgrade level and that you must cut and paste! It is adamant about that. ChatGPT3 does not seem to know much about ChatGPT4’s unique benefits, and vice versa.

Jealousy? Competing teams? Anyhoo…

Ask for directions

Our next “aha” came in a moment of frustration.  We wanted GPT4 to “remove production notes and subheads” from an audio script so I could drop it into a text-to-speech platform (thank you, Eric Shanfelt).

It would not.

“Well, what should I put in the prompt to do this?”  It suggested adding the phrase “without unspoken elements like segment titles” to the prompt. That worked. It’s pretty good about telling you how to construct a query when asked.

Finally, GPT4,  our hero, booted me off after 40 questions, which was its limit for every 3 hours.  So, if you are bumped at 9 a.m., it will not let you back on until noon. Nice to know!

In short, don’t try to replace writers – or yourself. Focus on cutting steps in post-content creation.  Pay for ChatGPT4.  Save the prompts somewhere. If you get stuck, ask it what to add to the prompt. And don’t get sucked into prompt-building on a deadline.

Finally, check out basic prompt strategies

Click here to see top prompts and prompt strategies for media companies.