Real-World Examples and Exercises
Last year, we commissioned a small team of writers to research and write about how people used ChatGPT in different industries. We covered 15 different industries or categories and put together a distribution table of the kinds of work they used ChatGPT to do.
We found that the most common way people used ChatGPT across industries involved drafting documents. So, if you’re trying to figure out how to use ChatGPT at work, start by thinking about what written output you create regularly on a regular basis.
How Dan uses ChatGPT to write
Most of what I know about writing with ChatGPT I learned from attended a workshop by Dan Shipper. He covered six ways AI can help the writing process.
The first way involves capturing your thoughts
Dan writes interesting articles about artificial intelligence for his publication called ‘Every‘. When he has an idea for an article, he will capture it by recording a voice note. He will then take a transcript of this messy, initial version of the idea and ask ChatGPT to summarize it into bullet points for later.
Then organizing your thoughts
Another way Dan uses ChatGPT involves feeding his notes into a prompt and asking for an outline. This serves as a useful way to find the best connective tissue between ideas before committing to the writing process.
Styling those thoughts
ChatGPT excels at style. If you have a piece of writing and you want to inflect it with flavor, you can list out specific stylistic interventions in bullet points, like Dan has done in the prompt below.
Another way Dan alters the style involves asking ChatGPT to rewrite it in the style of a specific author. The more popular the author, the better ChatGPT performs at this. For more obscure authors, you can always include a sample of their writing and ask it to emulate the style.
Summarizing complex ideas
Dan also uses ChatGPT to summarize key concepts when he’s trying to explain something tricky. In the example below, he used ChatGPT to summarize “Utilitarianism” in three sentences.
Importantly, you should only do this when you know what you write about. If I tried to ask ChatGPT to summarize “Bayesian Statistics” in 3 sentences, I don’t know if the summary proves accurate since I don’t know much about the topic.
Getting unstuck
If you use ChatGPT for nothing else, use it to beat down procrastination.
When Dan gets stuck writing, he will copy in what he’s so far and ask for an outline of the rest.
You will almost never use the ideas it suggests. Watch ChatGPT trying to finish your essay, and everything wrong with its approach jumps out at you. You impulsively start to correct things. Seeing what you don’t want acts as a surprisingly effective way to get yourself writing when you get stuck.
Useful Feedback
Finally, Dan uses ChatGPT to evaluate his writing when he’s finished writing. You can ask ChatGPT for feedback and it will give you a useful perspective as an editor.
So there you have it, the six ways Dan uses AI as a writing tool:
Capture your thoughts
Organize your notes
Influence style
Summarize complex ideas
Help you when you get stuck
Evaluate your writing
This by no means represents an exhaustive list. The workshop took place over a year ago. I’m sure Dan uses ChatGPT in different ways now. The workshop still provides a brilliant overview of the main ways you can use ChatGPT to write.
How I use ChatGPT to write
As the co-founder of a software product, sometimes I use ChatGPT to draft PRDs. I want to show you a contrasting scenario so you can use ChatGPT for lots of different types of writing.
I will let ChatGPT explain a PRD, if you’ve never heard of the acronym.
A PRD, or Product Requirements Document, is a document that outlines the key features, functionality, and objectives of a product. It serves as a guide for the development team, helping them understand what needs to be built and why. The PRD is an essential tool for aligning stakeholders, including product managers, designers, engineers, and executives, ensuring everyone is on the same page regarding the product’s goals and requirements.
Technical documents. No where near as much fun to read as Dan’s prose. Nonetheless, they matter. Here’s how I use ChatGPT to write them:
No need to use ChatGPT to capture thoughts because I usually have a clear idea of the feature I’m pitching when I sit down to write a PRD. Instead I use a prompt like the one below, which I used when I wrote a pitch to let users import CSV files into our app.
WRITE A PRODUCT REQUIREMENTS DOCUMENT FOR A NEW FEATURE FOR OUR APP.
BELOW IS AN EXPLANATION OF WHAT OUR PRODUCT DOES AND WHO IT IS FOR, ALONG WITH A BASIC DESCRIPTION OF THE NEW FEATURE WE INTEND TO ADD.
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WHAT OUR PRODUCT DOES:
THE REASON TO USE OUR PRODUCT IS THAT IT LETS YOU CHAIN CHATGPT PROMPTS TOGETHER TO CREATE TEMPLATES FOR REUSABLE SETS OF TASKS OR WORKFLOWS. THIS HELPS YOU SAVE TIME AND BOOST PRODUCTIVITY.
WHO OUR PRODUCT IS FOR:
THE TARGET MARKET HERE IS MARKETING AGENCIES.
FEATURE DESCRIPTION:
THE FEATURE IS TO LET PEOPLE ADD CSV FILES TO THE PROMPT STEPS. THIS LETS PEOPLE RUN ANALYSIS ON CSV DATA AS PART OF A WORKFLOW. THIS COULD BE GREAT FOR CREATING CUSTOM REPORTS FROM LARGER, MORE COMPLICATED SETS OF DATA.I included a description of our product, the target audience, and some basic details on the proposed feature. Rather than structuring this as one giant paragraph, I split the prompt out into separate sections which made it easier to update and reuse the next time I needed it.
ChatGPT generated a complete PRD in response to this prompt, but as expected, it sounded like garbage. Much too jargon-y and it was vague on the specifics where it mattered.
At this point in the process I spent about 10 minutes cleaning up any major misunderstandings. ChatGPT didn’t fully understand what the feature was, so I deleted some sections and added important details as bullet points where necessary. I ignore how the PRD is written at this stage. The goal involved making sure the substance made sense.
Most teams have their own particular way of writing PRDs. We settled on a slightly modified version of the approach Ryan Singer uses in his book ‘Shape Up’. Luckily for us, ChatGPT knows about ‘Shape Up’, so the following prompt sufficed to restructure the entire PRD:
REWRITE THIS PRD IN THE STYLE OF RYAN SINGER'S SHAPE UPNow I had a PRD structured the way I wanted. At this point I spent about 20 minutes refining how it communicated things: cleaning up details, updating the language, removing anything unnecessary, and most importantly, adding actual sketches or screenshots of our product to relevant sections. This does not constitute something I would ever expect ChatGPT capable of. This step makes up the main chunk of “writing” when creating a PRD.
The next step involves getting some feedback on the pitch. I used ChatGPT to do a pre-mortem to scan for any obvious problems.
HIGHLIGHT THE MOST CRITICAL POTENTIAL FAILURES IN THE FEATURE DEVELOPMENT BASED ON THE DETAILS IN THE PROVIDED PRDThen I wanted feedback from a specific perspective.
PRETEND TO BE AN EXPERIENCED CUSTOMER SUPPORT MANAGER. GIVE ME YOUR TOP THREE CONCERNS WITH THE FOLLOWING FEATURE.You can repeat this and swap out ‘customer support manager’ for any role or department you want. Aim to anticipate any low-hanging fruit. That way, when you send the pitch to the customer support team, they will give you useful feedback instead of wasting their time with concerns ChatGPT could have anticipated.
Sometimes I also like to invert the question, and ask ChatGPT for suggestions on how to make the experience more delightful, rather than just treating it as a critic.
HOW COULD WE MAKE THE USER EXPERIENCE EVEN MORE DELIGHTFUL FOR THE FOLLOWING FEATURE?You can also use ChatGPT to write out user stories, microcopy, and release notes for your PRDs, but I won’t get into that here. Feel free to go through this little PDF on using ChatGPT to write PRDs if that’s your thing.
Your Turn
If you’re someone who writes blog post, then lean on Dan’s approach. If you have to produce technical documents, my way of using the same ideas might may prove more useful.
Either way, I’m going to give you a 20-minute exercise where you can apply all the principles we covered and make them easier to remember when you need them. Reading about how other people use ChatGPT is great, but nothing beats practice.
For this exercise, we’re going to write a quick progress report to update someone on what you are working on. No matter who you are, we all have to give someone updates. If you’re a boss, then you have to update your customers or fans. If you don’t have a manager, then you probably had to give your colleagues some kind of progress report.
I want you to spend 20 minutes using ChatGPT to write out an update on what you have been working for whoever you report to or share updates with.
Getting unstuck – Unless you woke up expecting to write a progress report today, this may feel like a strange exercise to get started on. To get myself going, I started with “Please write out a progress update for my co-founder on what I have been working on lately. Explain what I am working towards, when I hope to achieve it by, and what the main challenges are at the moment.”
Swap out “co-founder” for whoever you want to write to and swap out “progress report” for whatever word you’re more comfortable with for the kind of update you’re putting together.
In order to make this exercise useful, please don’t treat this as hypothetical. Write an actual update for someone specific and tell them what you’ve been up to. If you really can’t think of someone then just writing to a friend telling them how you’ve been spending your time lately.Add in the specifics – I deliberately did not add specific details to the previous prompt because I didn’t want to get bogged down on the first step. Now that I have an entire example update written out, I have some momentum. The update can’t possibly be true because ChatGPT doesn’t know what you’re working on, so now go through the example and fix factual inaccuracies.
I encourage you not to change the wording or tone of the update at this stage, just focus on the specific information you want to convey. I suggest using bullet points so that you don’t get caught up trying to “write”.Summarize complex ideas – If you’re working on something complicated, I suggest using ChatGPT. This is the prompt I used to explain a PRD earlier in the post: “What is a PRD? Please summarize in 3 sentences for a layperson.“
Inflect style – Now that you have the substance down, let’s work on making it sound better. In my opinion, the best way to do this is to find a “progress reports” you’ve sent this person before and then ask ChatGPT to emulate it
Please rewrite the following progress update to match the style, tone and structure of these other progress updates I have sent them in the past.”)
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Current progress update:
[paste current progress update here]
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Past progress update 1:
[paste a past progress update here]
Past progress update 2:
[paste another past progress update here]The three hashtags are called delimiters. They help separate distinct parts of a prompt so that ChatGPT doesn’t confuse your progress updates with the actual prompt. You don’t have to use hashtags; you can use any character you want as a delimiter as long as you are consistent.
If you have never sent this person a progress report before, then I suggest going over Dan’s style prompt from earlier in the post. You can also try asking it to emulate your favorite author and rewrite the update in their style, or you can ask it to match your writing style by providing an unrelated example of your writing.
Finally, ask for some feedback – At the very least, get GPT to proofread your writing (“Please rewrite this content to identify and fix grammatical and punctuation errors.”). If you want a distinct perspective, consider modifying one of my feedback prompts from earlier in the post. If you want more editorial feedback, then modify Dan’s writing feedback prompt.
That’s it.
You now know how to write with ChatGPT. Hopefully, these examples and principles will seep into the many other forms of writing you have to do throughout your work week.
The most important takeaway is that at no point did we use AI to replace the writing process. We used it to get started, to organize our thoughts, to explain things, to get feedback… but we still did the actual “writing” bit ourselves. Trying to fully automate your writing process is a waste of time. ChatGPT is a relentlessly useful tool, but it is not meant to be a replacement to the writing process.
Josh Pitzalis 