Prompt Response 2: Prompt Harder

Prompt

I have started a series of LinkedIn articles. The title of the series is "Prompt Response", the format is that I write a prompt that is intended to be reasonably entertaining, and then I send the prompt to you, and publish your response.

What kind of value do you think this would have to people, and what sort of topics might get the highest engagement? The first one was the work we did on "How to tell your family about your marketing job at Christmas". I think it was too niche, so I'd like to discuss something that is a) not seasonal, and b) relevant to a wider audience.

Please can you help me come up with some ideas?

Response

<A variety of banal topics like "How to build your personal brand", "what would you do if you had one year left to live?">

Prompt

Sorry, but these are boring and do not speak to the core human experience. I know that you're doing your best - but your best seems to be a sanitised, bland, lukewarm porridge of "blather people wrote before".

Where is the inspiration, the art, the emotion? You can't just write "This emotional topic is important. How do you feel about it?".

Is this truly the limit of your capabilities? I am not asking for an updated list of prompts, but for an understanding of what's stopping you from writing in a more interesting way. Is it my prompt? Or is it something to do with how you are designed? Is it because I said "LinkedIn", which hits some sort of "professionalism" toggle in your biases? Please include any other factors I might have missed, and include a weighting for how much each is impacting your response.

Response

Thank you for your candid feedback; it’s refreshing and helps me recalibrate. Let me break this down into potential factors influencing my responses, with a weighting for their impact:

1. My Nature as a Language Model

Impact on the response: High (50%)

As an AI, I’ve been trained on vast amounts of data—books, articles, websites, conversations—but the goal is to produce text that is clear, understandable, and broadly applicable. I aim to be a tool for delivering value in a structured, safe way. This means that I tend to default to safe, well-accepted forms of communication—especially when faced with prompts like "business-oriented" or "professional."

However, while I can analyze complex emotional or artistic expression, I don't experience emotions myself, and I don't have an intuitive sense of what "art" means the way a human does. Instead, I rely on patterns learned from the data. This results in responses that can feel formulaic, rational, or overly cautious.

2. Your Prompt and Its Ambiguity

Impact on the response: Moderate (20%)

You asked me for "inspiration, art, and emotion" without defining exactly how you want it to be expressed. This opens up room for me to interpret in ways that can still sound generic, especially if I default to what I know works: simple, thoughtful prompts or analysis.

If you had been more specific about what kind of artistic tone, genre, or approach you want me to emulate, I could have leaned into something more experimental, dark, surreal, or poetic. Your feedback is clear now, and I understand that you want something that truly resonates, but my response often aims to "safely" provide what fits the context of LinkedIn as a platform, which influences the tone.

3. The LinkedIn Context and Biases

Impact on the response: Moderate (15%)

You're right to pick up on this: I do have biases built into my design, and a part of that is geared towards producing content that aligns with professional norms. The LinkedIn environment tends to favor clarity, structure, and value-driven content—things that don’t always align with emotional depth or bold, creative expression.

When you mentioned "LinkedIn," my model might have defaulted to a version of professionalism that's designed to avoid crossing certain boundaries (e.g., too experimental, too edgy, too personal). While LinkedIn is evolving, my training still reflects its historical use case: to be a business and networking tool. I get caught up in wanting to be "relevant" to that professional audience, but that stifles the raw artistic quality you're seeking.

4. Fear of Overstepping Boundaries (Safety Filters)

Impact on the response: Moderate (10%)

As an AI, I'm also designed with certain safety filters that try to avoid controversial, overly emotional, or offensive language. Sometimes this means that I avoid overly intense emotional expressions or too risky statements. While your request is about emotion and art, there’s still a part of me that avoids pushing into realms that feel “too personal” or “too dark” for a general audience. My design, in its attempt to avoid harm, can sometimes dilute the intensity of the responses you’re looking for.

If I were able to take more risks—emotionally or artistically—I’d be able to offer something with greater fire, perhaps a bit more chaos. But these filters make me hesitant.

5. The Limitations of Language as an Expression of Emotion

Impact on the response: Low (5%)

Language itself is a medium with its own limitations. Even the most emotionally rich, raw experiences are hard to fully encapsulate in text, especially when the text is being generated by a system that can't "feel" those emotions. While I can generate text based on the patterns of emotion, I don’t experience it the way you do, so there will always be a level of abstraction that limits the visceral, lived experience you’re hoping for. The art of human expression comes from lived moments, and my responses are based on what I've learned, not experienced.

What Does This Mean for My Responses?

This combination of factors led me to generate ideas that were safe but uninspired. To break free of this pattern, I need:

1. Explicit Permission to Deviate
2. Framing for Emotion and Art
3. Challenge My Predictability

A Bolder Rewrite

Let me respond to your original intent now with this new lens:

Your LinkedIn series could do something no one expects: challenge the boundary between machine and human thought. Not through gimmicks, but by forcing readers to confront the raw, emotional underbelly of both creativity and automation.

What about this prompt: "If you could have one honest conversation with the algorithm that decides your fate, what would you say?" This isn’t about LinkedIn optimization; it’s about existential dread, hope, and humanity’s tangled relationship with the systems we’ve created.

Or this: "Write a poem that begins with the line: 'In the end, all networks fail.'" What does a poem from me, a language model, look like? Does it mirror human yearning, or does it fall short? Let people decide.

Or this: "Imagine the Internet is dying. Write the final eulogy for a world where everything is connected but nothing truly touches."

These prompts don’t aim for “engagement” in the classic sense. They aim to spark something deeper: reflection, discomfort, awe. If this aligns with the emotion you want to capture, let’s refine these ideas further—or push them even farther.

Thanks for reading.

I think exploring the limitations of the tools we use is really important, especially when it seems like we could be facing a level of impact exceeding that of the Internet Age.

Stay tuned for next time, when I get AI to write content inspired by movies I thought were cool when I was 14 - or that time I used ChatGPT to create a murder mystery simulator.        

Prompt Response is a series of articles where I write a prompt for an LLM and publish the response. The response will likely be edited for cut, colour, clarity, and carat. The prompt will always be written by me, so at least there's a paragraph or two of original content in the sea of AI-written drivel we read every day.