How to write an effective GPT prompt

GPT—a family of AI models built by OpenAI—can tell bad jokes and write hilarious poems about your life, but it can also help you do your job better. The catch: you need to help it do its job better, too.

At its most basic level, GPT predicts text based on an input called a prompt. But to get the best results, you need to write a clear prompt with ample context. After tinkering with it for more hours than I'd like to admit, these are my tips for writing an effective GPT prompt.

Test your prompt

There's very little chance that the first time you put your AI prompt in, it'll spit out exactly what you're looking for. You need to write, test, refine, test, and so on, until you consistently get an outcome you're happy with. I recommend testing your prompt in the OpenAI playground or with Zapier's OpenAI integration.  

As you're testing, you'll be able to tweak a bunch of variables—things like model, temperature, maximum length, and stop sequences. It can be a lot to get the hang of, so to get started, I suggest playing with just two of them. 

• Temperature allows you to control how creative you want the AI to be (on a scale of 0 to 2). A lower score makes the bot less creative and more likely to say the same thing given the same prompt. A higher score gives the bot more flexibility and will cause it to write different responses each time you try the same prompt. The default of 1 is pretty good for most use cases. 

• Maximum tokens is a control of how long the combined prompt and response can be. If you notice the AI is stopping its response mid-sentence, it's likely because you've hit your max length, so increase it a bit and test again. 

GPT prompt guide: How to write an effective GPT prompt 

Help the bot help you. If you do each of the things listed below—and continue to refine your prompt—you should be able to get the output you want.

1. Offer context 

Just like humans, AI does better with context. Think about exactly what you want the AI to generate, and provide a prompt that's tailored specifically to that. 

Here are a few examples of ways you can improve a prompt by adding more context.

By including the type of content ("blog") as well as some details on what specifically to cover in the blog post, the bot will be a lot more helpful.

Here's another example, this time with different types of details.

In the better prompt, we ask the AI to take on a specific role ("dog trainer"), and we offer specific context around the age and type of dog. As with the previous example, we also tell the bot what type of content we want ("email").

The AI can change the writing style of its output, too, so be sure to include context about that if it matters for your use case.

This can also be adapted to all sorts of business tasks (think: sales emails)—for example, "write a professional but friendly email" or "write a formal executive summary."

2. Include helpful information upfront 

Let's say you want to write a speaker's introduction for yourself: how is the AI supposed to know about you? It's not that smart (yet). But you can give it the information it needs so it can reference it directly. For example, you could feed it by dropping a link to your online portfolio, or copying and pasting your resume or LinkedIn profile at the top of your GPT prompt like this:

Another common use case is getting the AI to summarize an article for you. Here's an example of how you'd get OpenAI's GPT to do that effectively.

If you're using ChatGPT and you want the AI chatbot to remember details, like your resume, without having to input it repeatedly, ChatGPT offers a few built-in features to do just this. You can use custom instructions to tell ChatGPT more about you, and it'll consider this in its future responses. For ChatGPT Plus subscribers, there's also a memory functionality that automatically picks up on details and preferences as you interact with it. Or you can build your own custom ChatGPT and feed it the exact knowledge resources you want it to reference. 

3. Give examples 

Providing examples in the GPT prompt can help the AI understand the type of response you're looking for (and gives it even more context).

For example, if you want the AI to reply to a user's question in a chat-based format, you might include a previous example of a conversation between the user and the agent. You'll want to end your prompt with "Agent:" to indicate where you want the AI to start typing. You can do so by using something like this:

Examples can also be helpful for math, coding, parsing, and anything else where the specifics matter a lot. If you want to use OpenAI to format a piece of data for you, it'll be especially important to give it an example. Like this:

Providing positive examples (those that you like) can help guide the AI to deliver similar results. But you can also tell it what to avoid by showing it negative examples—or even previous results it generated for you that you didn't like.

4. Tell it the length of the response you want 

When crafting your GPT prompts, it's helpful to provide a word count for the response so you don't get a 500-word answer when you're looking for a sentence (or vice versa). You might even use a range of acceptable lengths.

For example, if you want a 500-word response, you could provide a prompt like "Write a 500-750-word summary of this article." This gives the AI the flexibility to generate a response that's within the specified range. You can also use less precise terms like "short" or "long." 

5. Define the expected formats 

GPT can output various code languages like Python and HTML as well as visual styles like charts and CSVs. Telling it the format of both your input and your desired output will help you get exactly what you need. For example: 

It's easy to forget to define the input format (in this case, CSV), so be sure to double-check that you've done that in your GPT prompt.

Another example: perhaps you want to add the transcript of your latest podcast interview to your website but need it converted to HTML. The AI is great at doing this, but you need to tell it exactly what you need.

6. Ask it to help you come up with a prompt

Another effective strategy for creating powerful prompts is to have the AI do it for you. That's not a joke: you can ask GPT to craft the ideal prompt based on your specific needs—and then reuse it on itself. 

The idea here is to use the AI model as a brainstorming tool, employing its knowledge base and pattern recognition capabilities to generate prompt ideas that you might not have considered. 

To do this, frame your request as clearly and specifically as possible—and detail the parameters of your needs. For example, say you want GPT to help you understand error messages when something goes wrong on your computer. 

GPT will take those requirements into consideration and return a prompt that you can then use on it—it's the circle of (artificial) life.

7. Use some of these handy expressions

Sometimes it's just about finding the exact phrase that OpenAI will respond to. Here are a few phrases that folks have found work well with OpenAI to achieve certain outcomes. 

"Let's think step by step"

This makes the AI think logically and can be specifically helpful with math problems. 

"Thinking backwards"

This can help if the AI keeps arriving at inaccurate conclusions.

"In the style of [famous person]"

This will help match styles really well.

"As a [insert profession/role]"

This helps frame the bot's knowledge, so it knows what it knows—and what it doesn't. 

"Explain this topic for [insert specific age group]"

Defining your audience and their level of understanding of a certain topic will help the bot respond in a way that's suitable for the target audience.

"For the [insert company/brand publication]"

This helps GPT understand which company you're writing or generating a response for, and can help it adjust its voice and tone accordingly.

8. Give GPT a role 

GPT can respond from a designated point of view (for example, a market researcher or expert in solar technologies) or in a specific coding language without you having to repeat these instructions every time you interact with it. 

To do this, in the OpenAI playground, modify the System prompt from its default "You are a helpful assistant" to whatever you want GPT to be. For example: 

By giving GPT a role, you're automatically adding persistent context to any future prompts you input. 

If you're using ChatGPT, you can also do something similar by describing a role in your custom instructions.

Automate your GPT prompts

Now that you know how to write an effective GPT prompt, it's time to put that skill to use in your workflows. With Zapier's OpenAI and ChatGPT integrations, you can automate your prompts so they run whenever things happen in the apps you use most. That way, you can do things like automatically draft email responses, brainstorm content ideas, or create task lists.

Learn more about how to automate OpenAI and ChatGPT, or get started with one of these pre-made templates.

You can also use Zapier and GPT to build your own AI chatbot. Zapier's free AI chatbot builder uses the power of GPT to help you customize your own customer-facing chatbot—no coding required. Or you can use Zapier Central to build a bot that streamlines all your own workflows.

Related reading:

• How to write effective AI art prompts

• How to use OpenAI to add acceptance criteria to product issues

• How to use OpenAI's GPT to write business emails

• What is prompt engineering?

This article was originally published in January 2023 and has also had contributions from Elena Alston and Jessica Lau. The most recent update was in June 2024.