Dr. StrangeBot, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Use ChatGPT to Create a Blog About Act-On’s New AI Feature

by Matt Sailor, Act-On's Sr. Content Marketing Manager

The Act-On marketing team has been experimenting with generative AI since the technology became widely available. Our creative director, Trevan, uses it to build creative briefs. Kelsey, on our demand gen team, relies on it for things like webinar abstracts. I’ve used it to create blogs that would require more research time than my freelancers or I have available.?

When we began planning for the launch of our new AI feature, Act-On AI Create, I had a lightbulb moment. Our new AI Create feature would be powered by ChatGPT. So I thought, why not use ChatGPT to write the blog? Specifically, I wanted to try something a little different: role playing with ChatGPT to create a blog that felt like a sit down interview between two people.?

If you haven’t read that blog yet, take a look, then join me back here for a look behind the scenes, as I take you through my process and offer a few tips for generative AI prompts.

Finding the Right Prompts is Key to Success with Generative AI

I’ve been pretty skeptical about AI from the start. And to be honest, I remain pretty skeptical—not in a “Skynet attacks Los Angeles with nuclear weapons” way, but in more of a “to a very experienced creative, this technology still feels pretty limited” way.?

With this idea, I knew I had one major limitation ahead of me. As ChatGPT itself will tell you, it has a limited understanding of current events past September 2021. How could I get it to write about a feature we hadn’t even thought of at that time? I knew I’d have to get creative with my prompts. Prompts are the questions and requests users type into AI chatbots like ChatGPT to generate results.

My first few attempts fell a little flat. I’d ask ChatGPT a simple question, and it would fire off long responses full of numbered lists. I started to worry that my idea wasn’t going to work. As those who have used ChatGPT might be aware, the technology isn’t actually that chatty. A more accurate name for the technology might be, “SoliloquyGPT.”

Fortunately, I’d been practicing my prompt skills, and I had a few tricks left up my sleeve. It’s sort of funny: the breakthrough happened when I realized I needed to stop trying to trick the platform into doing what I wanted and just ask it directly. Here’s the prompt I used that finally got me where I was trying to go:

In my first attempts with questions like “Tell me about ChatGPT,” the bot gave me long, dry answers that felt like they were from the corporate boilerplate. With this prompt, ChatGPT was able to adapt and make the answers more pithy and conversational. Take a look at the image below, my first pass at the question “What is ChatGPT?”

Woof. I don’t know about you, but that would’ve had me bouncing from the blog post quicker than you can say, “Would you like to fill out this brief survey?”?

Now, take a look at ChatGPT’s response to the same question, reframed with my prompt about role-playing a more conversational interview. Note that, since I’d primed ChatGPT for the interaction, I didn’t even need to ask the question in a formal way:

Now that’s more like it! If you’ve read the interview blog, you know that some of ChatGPT’s responses are still pretty text-heavy. That was okay with me for more technical topics like marketing automation. But I needed the more casual questions peppered in between to give the feel and atmosphere of an interview.?

Use ChatGPT Not Just to Write, but to Rewrite

Any writer worth their salt knows that writing is rewriting. ChatGPT, to my surprise, is no different. Remember in section one, when I said some of the responses I was getting from ChatGPT were too long and dry? Well, as a content marketer, I try to never let content go to waste. So, I filtered some of those boring responses back through ChatGPT as new prompts.?

Here’s one of the first questions I asked ChatGPT for this interview, before I started refining my prompts.

The response is so long, I couldn’t even fit the whole thing into a single screenshot, so I’ll spare you. I tried another tack:

ChatGPT’s next response followed my instructions, but it didn’t go far enough. It essentially used the same long, boring copy, just reformatted into a Q and A. Here again, the response is overlong, and I won’t subject you to it.?

So I refined my prompt further. (Note that I like to include positive reinforcement with my ChatGPT prompts. This is probably unnecessary, but maybe it will score me some points with the new robot overlords).

This was the one! The next response from ChatGPT got me really close to what I wanted. I just had one more tweak to make. Check out this excerpt from the response:

That felt a little stilted to me. In a real interview, it’s pretty unlikely the responses will rephrase the question like that. And what’s with that question? Is that really how a human would phrase it? I asked for another refinement.

Bingo! With that, ChatGPT gave me the responses I ended up using in the blog for this series of questions.?

Humor in Generative AI…Still a Work In Progress

I like to include humor in my marketing, and I was determined to make ChatGPT write me a decent joke. As far as I was concerned, the illusion of a sit down interview that I wanted to create wouldn’t come across without some humor. I’ll confess that my attempts to get more humor incorporated throughout the interview itself didn’t quite pay off.?

In my opinion, this is one of the core limitations of AI technology so far. It doesn’t quite get humor. I grew up on the chatbots and web experiences of the AOL Instant Messenger and Web 1.0 era, so I was used to cheeky responses programmed by human devs. Anyway, I wanted to share some of the attempts at jokes ChatGPT made.

Huh. If you get this one, please let me know. I’m still puzzling over it. ChatGPT’s next attempts weren’t much better.

Okay. Another joke that made absolutely no sense, and a really corny one. As usual, I realized I needed to give ChatGPT more guidance if I wanted it to deliver what I wanted. (This is a good editing tip in general, by the way, for human and AI writers). I asked for a joke in the lightbulb format, and got just what I was looking for.

That was it. The chatbot actually made this AI skeptic chuckle. I’m closing with this?because I think it makes a pretty universal point about AI tools. If you, the human, don’t have a clear vision for what you want out of your content, you don’t have much hope of the AI pulling a rabbit out of a hat. It’s not magic, after all. Like any tool, it’s only as useful as the human who wields it.?

For more information:

• Learn more about how Act-On AI Create can help marketers build smarter, more targeted emails, including commentary from our leadership team.?
• Dive deeper into our vision for AI and marketing automation, and how the technology will change our industry in the next three years.
• Check out the interview with ChatGPT that inspired this behind the scenes article!