Going Crazy Meta With ChatGPT 4.0

 

 

---

Click on the gif above to watch this video on YouTube or click play below to listen to the Podcast version

---

 

 

Making an amazing prompt for ChatGPT is tough because it’s hard to know where to start. But what if there was a simple trick? A trick you can just copy/paste giving it just the roughest idea of what you want and have ChatGPT create the perfect prompt for you.

Today we’re gonna be talking about just having fun with ChatGPT. (or as I like to call it, Going Crazy Meta With ChatGPT 4.0)

The prompt used in this video, along with details on how it all works, can be found right here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1V…

 

00:00 Introduction

01:00 The value of ChatGPT in generating content and research.

02:00 Introduction to Merlin, a Chrome extension to help with replying to texts.

04:00 Using ChatGPT for research, even though its knowledge is limited to September 2021.

05:00 Using prompt-based tools to improve interaction with ChatGPT.

07:00 Creating a custom prompt for finding the best project management tool.

09:00 ChatGPT recommends Trello for a one-person virtual assistant business.

11:00 Adjusting the prompt to include a budget constraint.

12:00 ChatGPT recommends Toggle Plan when given a budget of up to $50 per month.

 

Merlin:  https://app.getmerlin.in/plans

 

The Prompt Template

Act as a prompt generator expert for ChatGPT. You will engineer the perfect custom prompt for me to use to [THING YOU NEED IT TO DO]. To do that, please ask a series of targeted questions one at a time. You will use the answer to each question to guide subsequent questions, refining the information you gather to ultimately generate a comprehensive and effective prompt that will yield the most useful and relevant response from ChatGPT. Consider the key elements of a good prompt, such as context and detail, to optimize the final product. Place any variables in square brackets.

 

---

The transcript is below if you would prefer to read this yourself instead of watching the video!

---

 

Hi and welcome back or welcome to Sidekick COO. I’m Sandra B, your Sidekick COO coming at you ‘Oh natural’ today because I’ve already recorded this video once and decided it wasn’t good enough. 

So I’m re-recording but didn’t have time to get all gussied up. So this is me! Hey! 

Anyways, today we’re gonna be talking about just having fun with ChatGPT. (or as I like to call it, Going Crazy Meta With ChatGPT 4.0)

So in particular, I’m not gonna get into a lot of things cuz I’ve been having a lot of fun with this tool I can tell you that! I’ve been using it to create some really bad copy, using it to create some really bad course outlines. But, I have also been able to create some pretty decent course outlines and some pretty decent copy with it. So if you play around with it enough, you get to learn how to engineer a really good prompt. 

You can actually get a lot out of ChatGPT. So don’t let like everybody, all the naysayers that are telling you that it’s worthless, useless, and not worth your time. 

It is very much worth your time. 

Now, is it the answer to your prayers? Is it the thing where you can just like type in a few words and get out a course that you can then sell for, you know, $4,000? No. Well yes, if you don’t care about quality and are okay with doing that cause people have done it! I don’t think that you can do that and I wouldn’t recommend doing that but what you can do is, you can find different AI tools and use them within your business to make things go faster. 

A tool that we just found, it’s called Merlin and it is a chrome extension that you can install on your Chrome browser. There’s a free plan for it, but you can get the next plan up for $20 so, not that expensive. And what it lets you do is highlight any text on your screen and say write a reply to this. It is so, so, so handy because often like I’ll get really long-form responses from people that I read through and sometimes it’s hard for me to get started what’s the most important thing for me to respond to here? 

Or sometimes I get really short messages and it’s like it’s so short that it’s almost not, it almost seems to not necessarily need a response but at the same time, I should respond. But what? Or just some days I’m just, I’m just brain dead, I’m not thinking well. And it’s like it’s taken me a little while to come up with something to say. Now, you only have to copy & paste. You just highlight, and hit ‘Command M’ and it will generate something for you. 

Now, you’re not going to just copy and paste that in and hit send because that is not what we do here. But you can copy it and edit it to make it an actual response from you. It just helps when you are struggling with your words when you’re struggling to figure out what to say or what to highlight from their message or whatnot, it will generate a really good starting point for you that you can then expand on, edit, & make your own. Super, super smart.

I’ll make sure that Caleb puts a link to it in the Description below.  ⬇️

But the thing that I’ve been playing a lot with recently is ChatGPT. And what I’ve been using it the most for is kinda like just research, just seeing what it can pull. Now it doesn’t have anything that’s newer than September 2021. So all the data is old but it can still be super useful to get a starting point for your research and see where you can get started. A lot of things that you might be looking for don’t change that much over the years. So if you’re looking for a good project management tool, if you’re trying to figure out what school to send your kid to, if you’re trying to figure out what’s the best exercise to get rid of like your tummy or whatever it is, a lot of those things, the advice doesn’t change too much year over year. So you can certainly use the tool to look that information up. 

Now the thing that I found difficult is trying to determine what to actually type in in order to get the information that I really want. So there are a lot of different places where you can find prompts. There’s like promptly and FlowGPT I think it was called GPT I think I say that wrong every time and prompt Base. So I was recently on PromptBase. I found a prompt that will help you generate prompts, which is fricking neat. So if you’re trying to figure out what to say in a prompt to get the best results, there’s a prompt that you can use to help you generate prompts. 

Having Fun with ChatGPT – Here’s how it went!

Now the problem I had, was I basically just said, “Hey ChatGPT, act as a prompt engineer and follow these guidelines and create a prompt for me. Here’s what I want the prompt to be about” and then you’d have to fill in the blank. And that blank is always what I struggle with because it’s always something like you have to cover a lot of information in order to really get the most out of it. If I’m looking for exercises to strengthen my core, for instance, I could just put that in. But what if I want exercises that target a specific area of my core? 

Maybe you might be looking for a new project management tool, you wanna try and find the one that’s gonna be the most suitable for you and your business, but how do you know what information you need to put in there to get it to give you that result? So I wasn’t really super happy with the original prompt, it was really good. You can use it exactly as is and it works really well. But for me, I need something different. 

So, I created a prompt that I think is pretty darn good. And I’m just gonna go over it quickly with you here so you can see what it is. Don’t worry. Caleb will put all of the actual prompt template in the description below, but I’m just gonna show you what the prompt was, what it does and the results that it gave. 

So here is my original prompt. I’m not gonna read it out and Caleb will put the text below. But basically, it’s just telling ChatGPT to act like a prompt engineer, an expert prompt generator and it’s going to create the perfect custom prompt for me. The only variable that is put in here is this part here. So it’s like you will engineer the perfect custom prompt for me to, and then you enter this here, just like super brief.  

Basically, what are you trying to do with this prompt? And then ask me a series of questions. It’s gonna use my answers from each question to then form the next question. And then once it thinks it has enough information, it’s just going to spit out the prompt that it thinks I should use. So I put this into Chat GPT using GPT-4 and then hit enter and it spit this out. 

Questions from ChatGPT

So it asks me…

All right, great, what industry are you in? What’s your primary functions or services you provide? 

So I’m just like, all right, I’m gonna pretend I’m a virtual assistant and here’s what I do for my clients. 

It says thanks. What size is your team, including any freelancers or contractors? 

Well, I’m just gonna say that I’m just me right now.

And then it’s like…

Great and what features do you prioritize in a project management tool? 

I love that it gives me the example because sometimes it’s like, all right, I don’t know. What are all the features? So yep, I need all of these. I need time tracking, task management. And then so I said, yep, I need all of those and I especially need the budgeting features cuz I wanna be able to do all this stuff. 

And it’s like:

Great, thanks for the details. Do you have any specific requirements regarding integrations with other tools? 

Again, it gives you examples, so that’s super handy. Yeah, maybe, you know, yeah, I’d love it to integrate with my email, maybe even with my calendar. And what I really love about Chat GPT is that you can just answer in that kind of natural response. You don’t actually have to really think hard about the words you’re saying. You really can just say, well yeah, I guess I want it to be able to do this and maybe this and it will basically understand what you’re saying. So that’s awesome.

And then it says…

All right, so here’s the prompt I think you should use. 

And it creates this big prompt for me. 

So all I’ve got so far now is like a prompt that should spit out what the best tool is for me and my business. So then I just copied that prompt, and I started a new chat, (I could, could have probably done it in this same chat, but I started a new chat just so that you can see easily) 

So, that prompt got put in and then the answer it gave was…

All right, considering the requirements, I recommend Trello and here’s why I recommend Trello. 

Now what I like about it is it does go through all of the features that it thinks that or that you basically said that you needed and it gives you an understanding of whether it has that or not. Budgeting was the main thing that I wanted and it says it doesn’t have native budgeting features, but it can be integrated with third party budgeting tools like EverHour or Timecamp, which can help track our spending on a project’s profitability. 

So it took into consideration the fact that I really wanted that, even though this tool doesn’t have it natively. So that’s kind of neat. But the reason behind it picking Trello is because Trello offers a free plan with limited features. However, for additional features like power-ups, it might be upgraded to a paid plan. But basically, it figured because I am a one person business that I wanna keep costs low. So it’s giving me something that has as many of the features that I want in it without it breaking my budget.

Then it gives me like a brief overview of like, here’s some other things if you wanna take a look at a few others. So basically all of these other ones, Asana, Monday.com, Basecamp, all of that stuff are things that it seems to believe would be good for me. But it says that Trello’s visual approach and flexibility may get the most suitable choice for a one-person business like yours.

So it really highlighted that one person business and it says other tools may offer more advanced features, but they often come with higher costs and may be more complex than your needs. So it really did focus on the fact that I’m a one person business, therefore I don’t need all the complexity, but I can still get what I need by integrating with other tools.

So that was super, super handy because I can say like, oh, this is the tool for me. Okay, great. And why does it think it’s the tool for me? This is why. All right, fantastic. Now I wanted to kind of see what it would do if I said, okay, well I really want the budgeting feature and price is no, not that price is no object, but like give it a budget. 

So I did it again and in this one here and you can see that it’s the exact same prompt. Basically, I just added, I’m willing to spend up to $50 a month to get the features I most want. And what I love is that when I did this, and actually you know I’m gonna try it cuz on the other chat, so this was the original response it gave me. I’m just gonna say I am willing to do, I just wanna see if it’s gonna gimme the same thing. So here it’s giving me Click Up and this is how ChatGPT is different, right? 

So here is telling me ClickUp because whatever reason, but something about the way I phrased it here,

it’s telling me I would recommend Toggl Plan. Now that’s really cool cuz Toggl Plan is one I didn’t know existed. I had heard of Toggl before for time tracking. I did not know they had a project management tool. 

Tell me I don’t have to play with that now. ????

So then now I have all the information about this Toggl Plan, which is really neat cuz I had never heard of it before and it tells me exactly why it thinks that this would be the best choice for me. And again, at the bottom it tells me, you know, compared to other popular tools like Asana, Monday.com, and Click Up, Toggl Plan offers a competitive set of features at an affordable price point. So it remembered that, you know, I’m still a one person show and it says it’s specifically tailored to freelancers and small businesses. While some other tools may offer more advanced features or customization, Toggl Plan’s, simplicity and focus on essential project management capabilities make it the ideal choice for your one person business. 

So I think that is really kind of telling the fact that when I kept, when I put that just that one piece of information in with the original prompt, it took everything into consideration. But when I just added that little bit at the end of this prompt, it’s supposed to take in everything, but I think sometimes it might lose the plot because it obviously doesn’t remember that I’m a one person show and Click Up. Yeah, super powerful. And yes, I can get it for under $50 a month, but it, for a one person show to have to deal with, Click Up and like you have to build it out all your, you know, on your own. You have to understand like how exactly you want it to work and you have to basically create how you’re going to use it. It’s a lot to do for one person. So as you’re getting busier and busier, it’s gonna be hard to maintain. Then you have to have somebody in your business with you who can actually maintain that for you.

So Click Up in this instance for a one person virtual assistant, unless you’re gonna specialize in Click Up and make that something like a service that you’re gonna offer, I would never recommend Click Up as a for a virtual assistant. So that’s a neat little tip just to try and get as much information into the original prompt as possible so that it really does take into consideration everything as a whole.

Anyway, so yeah. So that is my new favorite prompt for ChatGPT! 

If you like this video and want to have more conversations about different prompts and how you can use AI in your business and different AI tools you can use in your business, I am happy to play around and show you what I find. Just, you know, leave a comment and let me know. 

And as always, if you like this, please don’t forget to like and subscribe. It really, really helps and share it with a friend. I’m sure there’s lots of people out there that are really interested in the whole AI talk right now. So please, please, please share it. 

And again, don’t forget that together we thrive.

Have a great one.