On Long Prompts: At What Point Do I Just Write It Myself?

The shorter the prompt, the worse the result. Hey, isn’t this thing supposed to help us be faster and better???

I recently prompted AI with a series of prompts and corrections to get a 10-page document just beyond AI slop. It was a struggle. And when I looked back on the battlefield afterward, I realized just how technically complex and long my prompts were getting.

250 words for a single prompt.

Did it finish the document? Heck no. It did make it better. But at that point, depending on your skill level and experience, it’s up in air whether you should just write it yourself.

Even Chat-GPT suggested a 75-word prompt for me to give it (extremely meta) when I gave it a simple one-liner for a blog cover image.

So, with where AI is now, I’m shaping out some criteria for when it’s useful at all and when it’s more efficient for me to just write manually.

Forget AI when:

• You already have a very specific, established voice that flows naturally for you

• You’re the subject matter expert on the subject for which you’re writing (especially if it’s from lived experience and not retrievable from the internet)

• Similarly, you’re synthesizing information from outside the internet or reference doc that you’ve uploaded

• The above is true and you’re writing something fairly short (a page or two)

USE AI when:

• You’re writing in a voice/tone for a new brand or experimenting with your own voice

• You’re not an expert on the subject for which you’re writing (AI will help you crawl the interweb faster, but it still might be too generic or have mistakes)

• You just need basic info on stuff that’s easily discoverable on said interweb

• You’re writing something long and want to restructure globally faster, or you’re brainstorming 10+ of something and want to experiment faster