Talk to AI the opposite way you talk to people

Humans need brevity, and clarity in communication - GenAI tools like ChatGPT rewards the opposite.

This means to optimize your use of GenAI - make it a practice to communicate with it in a manner that is the opposite as you would a fellow human.

When a person first starts using GenAI, out of habit, they tend to communicate to it in a similar fashion as they would with another human being - short and simple. While GenAI has an incredible ability to infer and create great output based on this style - it’s true capability is not capitalized.

In human-to-human communication we strive for clarity, brevity, and simplicity. This format of communication addresses the limitations that we as biological organisms are constrained by with respects to energy, processing capacity, and mental storage.

GenAI is not constrained by the same biological limitations. It has abundant memory, processing power, and energy to process what you communicate to it without suffering from the human condition of “cognitive overload”.

As such to communicate with it optimally, and to get the most from it - you must communicate it in the opposite way as you communicate with humans. With GenAI… more is generally better with the caveat that it follows a few specific patterns that optimize for its understanding of what you are communicating to it. An example would be the basic format of:

- Stating the role you want it to take

- the action you need it to take

- your ultimate goal

- the desired output format

- inserting a large amount of context and additional information

Going forward, engage with GenAI tools like ChatGPT and Claude as extremely capable colleagues who have a strong grasp of English, but to get the most out of them - you must adjust the way that you communicate with them… to the opposite of how you would generally communicate to another human.