The value of the "First Draft" & Prompting

I had struggled to see the value of Gen AI when it came to composing emails or writing documents.

I am talking to people who just like me, wouldn't see the benefit of what people call "First Draft". I wanted it to do the whole thing perfectly. Gen AI is not quite there yet (soon will) but not today.

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So, how can it help me today??

To show you the value, let me experiment it with you. It will only take 5 steps.

Instead of jumping to the full actual article here, I will prompt Copilot to write it for me, with my ideas and tone of voice.

If you don't want to read it all, go to Step 5 :)

If you want to see the journey, follow along!

Step 1

I prompted Copilot with this:

• Write me na article that talks about the benefits of using copilot to help coming up with first draft
• Include on the article the fact that I just need bullet points to get started
• Inlcude the idea that it’s taking rhe cognitive load away to
• come up witht the what. A lot of the time is spent on the what and not the how. Once we know the what, it’s easier

(yes, I did have the typos!)

I got:

Step 2

Now, it's not perfect. But I can work with that.

I want to reorganise it. But first, by reading it, it occurred to me a new idea for the article: prompting.?

This is my new prompt:?

• Keeping as close to this article as possible, please add the idea that prompting is fundamental (at least, in this current age). Mention that prompting, even if you don’t' get it perfect, you can always steer it to the directon you want. Think as if it was a 12 year old child.

?(yes, more typos!)

?This is what I got:

Step 3

But now, I think it's something weird here.

It's not giving the importance that I wanted to the "cognitive load" idea.?

What I actually want is just these bits:

Step 4

I actually want to expand on the cognitive load side of things.

I could have prompted it better, but I asked:

• provide more impacts of how and why lesser cognitive workload is benefitial.

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I got:

(this is pretty much what I wanted to say to you, reading this article)

Step 5

?We are starting to get somewhere.

I wanted to refine these points and make it sound like me.

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What I prompted then was:

• now, make this sound like literal style of the following article.: (do not bring any idea from the article, just the literal style)

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(I copied a whole LinkedIn article that I wrote before):

I got:

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(and this is the article, with a more Diego-like intro)

Bottom line:

Because I am not Jonathan Rickard (read his stuff, he is brilliant, the best writer alive today - in my opinion), I find Copilot to at least get me off the ground at take that pain of getting started away.

Also, prompting, does help me to get to a better place. AI is a bunch of statistical approximations, we just need to be wise about it.

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If you are anything like me, I hope this journey provides you some insights on how a "First Draft" is good an perhaps how to apply it for emails, proposal or LinkedIn articles lol