EP 164: ChatGPT Doesn’t Suck. Your Prompts Do.
2 Jan 2026 · 0 min
Jordan Wilson argues ChatGPT works fine if you know how to use it. Five mistakes kill results: copy-pasting generic prompts, chasing quick outputs instead of building skill, skipping proper setup, relying on vague expert personas, and treating it like a shortcut. He offers a free course to fix your prompting.
Questions this episode answers
Prime Prompt Polish runs twice weekly: Tuesdays and Thursdays.
GPT-4 Turbo cited as having 128,000 tokens (Sam Altman Nov 7 announcement); ChatGPT Plus memory mentioned as 32,000 tokens (~25,000 words).
This is the Everyday AI show, the everyday podcast where we simplify AI and bring its power to your fingertips. Listen daily for practical advice to boost your career, business and everyday life.
Some people say, oh AI stinks. Chat GPT is no good. Guess what, everyone who's saying that you're wrong, you just have no clue what you're doing. So no, Chat GPT does not suck. Your prompts do. All right, I'm excited for today's episode. Welcome to Everyday AI. My name is Jordan Wilson. I am your host and Everyday AI is for you. This is your daily live stream podcast and free daily newsletter helping everyday people life like you and me learn and leverage generative AI. So as we do every single day. Before we get into that topic and I'm extremely excited, let's take a very quick look at what's going on in the world of AI news. So the Accenture CTO says the biggest worry for job consolidation is not using AI. In a recent report, Accenture CTO stressed the need to prioritize employee development over investing solely in AI AI technology. And despite the potential for job consolidation, the CTO said humans will still play a crucial role in the effective use of AI. Speaking of the effective use of AI, the New York Times is making headlines of its own on the effective use of AI. So the New York Times has hired an Editorial Director of Artificial Intelligence Initiatives. As media organizations explore the use of AI newsrooms while grappling with ethical considerations, the New York Times has hired Quartz co founder Zach Stewart to establish principles for the use of AI in the New York Times newsroom. Seward will also create a team to experiment with AI tools and help design training programs for journalists. This one is especially interesting for me given I spent about seven or eight years as a full time journalist. And I'll tell you this, if there's one thing, and I'm not speaking for the New York Times, but if there's one thing that especially medium sized newspapers want to do is it's cut staff. If I'm being honest, it's been like that for 15 years. So this is going to be interesting to see how the New York Times adapts to this new kind of division or department, how they use it ultimately in the long run, especially when it comes to employee count. So keep an eye on that and keep an eye on all media, all medium sized newspapers to try to emulate what the New York Times is doing. Doing all right. Last but not least, we know AI can help in healthcare, but it can hurt as well. So according to a new report detailing a class action lawsuit against a Medicare insurer. This class action lawsuit filed against the health insurer Humana, accuses the company of using an AI algorithm to systematically deny seniors rehabilitation care recommended by their doctors. Not good. This is the second lawsuit filed against a major health insurer for using an AI tool to restrict medically necessary care for Medicare Advantage patients. So not good. Not good, right? We always talk about great uses of AI in healthcare, but here's a negative one. So if you want to know more about those news stories, and there's always more, make sure to go to your everydayai.com Sign up for the free daily newsletter. We don't just recap every single day's podcast. There's also a whole lot more. So yes, we do cover these news stories and more. We have what's called Fresh Finds, which is just different AI happenings around the Internet and a lot more inside the newsletter. So if you haven't signed up, make sure you do. If you're listening on the podcast, go check your show notes, the links in there. If you're listening on the live stream, we put the link in there. So make sure to go to your everydayai.com and sign up for that free daily newsletter. All right, I'm excited to talk about also the AI Inner Circle. So if you haven't already signed up for the newsletter and you want to, you're going to want to pay attention to the AI Inner Circle. We were trying to release it our next iteration in December. It might not be till January, but we will announce it. We are going to be doing a live and a free session on building GPTs inside of chat GPT. There's a lot of things obviously that people on the Internet are getting wrong and that's making your GPTs not perform the way they should. And also if you are interested and just want to know, well, what are these GPTs? Well, it's a new feature, a new mode inside Chat GPT where you can essentially create a custom version of Chat GBT for yourself for your business. So make sure to join the newsletter, just reply, say AI Inner Circle and I'll put you on the early access list for that free event as well. So I want to know, I want to know from you all about Chat GPT because there's been a lot of stories recently and I have one up here on my screen that people are complaining and this is relatively new because the Chat GPT account responded to this on its Twitter. I don't, I, I can't Call it X y'. All, I'm sorry, but a lot of people are complaining that Chat GPT is getting lazier. And I want to know what your thoughts are. And I also want to know from our audience joining us live. And thank you, Barbie, for joining us. Jay, as always. Tara, good morning to you. Brian, Michael, hey everyone. It's great, it's great to see you and hear from you. But let me know right now what is either your one best Chat GPT prompting tip or the one biggest mistake that you made prompting inside Chat GPT. Because I want to take a look at it today. I actually, as weird as this Sounds, we're on 160 some episodes of Everyday AI. We've done a lot of episodes on Chat GPT and other large language models, but we haven't done an episode specifically on prompting. You know, sometimes I forget that even though we do a free prompting course literally twice a week, we have one tomorrow. It's called Prime Prompt Polish. So if you want access to that, just type in PPP in the comments. I'll send you a link. But we haven't actually talked about the concept of prompting on this show, which is crazy. But I'd hate to break it to all these news organizations that are just covering people complaining on Twitter about Chat GPT getting lazier. It's not we humans using large language models are getting lazier. We are not using them how they should be used. Right. There is a process that you should go through when working with large language models that most people are skipping. So I am going to go over today in today's episode on the five biggest prompting mistakes that people are making as well. But I also want to hear from our audience. Right. So if you are a normal podcast listener, maybe you know, you're listening on your commute to work or maybe this is your afternoon time doing the dishes. I love hearing from people that email me and they say, oh, I, I listen to the show at this time. It's, it's always so fun to hear. But regardless, I want to spend this time hearing from the live audience about your biggest prompting, either mistakes or your best prompting tip. As we get into today's show about why Chat GPT doesn't suck. Right? Love, love this from. From May British so May Brit, thanks for joining us as always. She says this tip hardly fails me. Tell me in a percentage how much you understand of this prompt. Yeah, it's a great one, I think. May Brit, we talked about this months ago. It's, it's, you know, Asking Chat GPT for a confidence score is fantastic. Right? And the biggest thing with ChatGPT or any large language model is you always want to do two things. You want to increase the, the quality of the output and you want to decrease hallucinations or made up stuff. Right. Like we talked Yesterday, hallucination is Dictionary.com's word of the year. So you always want to, when prompting in ChatGPT, you want to increase the quality of the output and you want to decrease the likelihood of having hallucinations. And may Brit's tip is a great one right there. Another one from Tara here. I love this is something we teach in our course but the reminder to ask Chat GPT to recap everything to ensure it remembers. Yes, you always have to test chat GPT as you are talking to it to make sure it is recalling and retaining the information. That's, that's another great one. All right. And more of a big picture question here from Jay. Jay, thanks. So saying as large language models evolve, will the need to pay as much attempt attention to prompting? Yes, I think so. There will always, I think be a need for human input. The input type and the input methodology may change, right. Because right now for the most part we are say most people are inputting with text, right? So within chatgpt you are typing a text response. Sometimes you may be inputting a photo or a uploading a PDF with very little text response. I do think obviously the future of large language models is multi, multimodality, right. So we saw that with Gemini, even though I accidentally roasted them yesterday. But prompts, even how we prompt is going to change. I think it is going to be much more of our voice, it is going to be video, it is going to be a combination multimodality. I wouldn't even be surprised in the future, right. If we're able to, whether it's through HTML or something else, you know, input all of those things at once, right. To input text image, photo or sorry, text image, video and audio all in one prompt. But I think that's where the future is heading. But regardless, the methodology of prompting I don't think is going to change. But maybe how we input something, Jay will. All right, look at this people just being a commercial for this. I love it. What's up Katie? Katie said for anyone who hasn't joined Jordan's prime prompt polish webinar, get on it. It's been a game changer. That's awesome. Thanks Katie. And then Tara saying 100% PPP and PPP Pro yes. Check, check your emails. Today we're gonna have an email out about our pro course, which is free as well, right? Yes. I am going to get into this. You know, sometime. This one time someone left a like a one star review and says, hey, the host takes too long to get to the point and you might as well listen on 1.5x. Well, I agree, might as well listen on 2x. But yes, you gotta get onto the PPP Prime Prompt Polish and the pro. But let's, let's get into these mistakes that you're making because, no, to answer that question that I just rhetorically posed five minutes ago about is Chat GPT getting lazier according to reports? No, just people are expecting more out of large language models and they're doing less. Right. So let's talk about the five biggest prompting mistakes that people are making that will show you that chatgpt doesn't suck. Your prompts do. Right? And I think we saw this especially maybe like six months ago or so, you know, when Chat GPT and other large language models were really starting to pick up steam. And you know, there's this big conversation about will AI take your job, yes or no? And people would share. And this was actually one of the driving factors behind, you know, what was, what was pushing this conversation forward of will AI take your job or not? People were sharing their prompts and the results from Chat GPT and saying, oh, see, AI won't take your job. Like, look at how bad this response is. And I should have responded to those people. But I try to be a nice person of like, no, it's just saying, like, you suck at Chat GPT or you suck at large language models. Right? I like to be nice, but that's the reality. Right? The reality. Like, y', all, I've been, and I talk about this in the PPP course, I've been getting paid to write for 20 plus years. Yes, I'm maybe older than the nice camera makes me look, but I've been getting paid to write for 20 plus years and ChatGPT is a better writer than me, period. Will I get that quality of writing with a copy and paste prompt? Absolutely not. But Chat GPT is a better writer than me if you take the time to use Chat GPT and if you correctly, and if you take the time to learn prompting. Because here's the reality, y', all, prompting is an essential skill set in the future, right? Right now, you may not be prompting every day, but as generative AI comes to our operating system. So I'm looking at things like Microsoft Copilot coming to the operating system or with generative AI coming to where you work, right? Like as an example, maybe you work on aws, Amazon Web Services and you know Q. Their Amazon Q is, you know, being released. Whether you know it or not, sooner rather than later, you will be spending a good chunk of your day prompting, right? As enterprise companies start to adapt gen AI. As gen AI comes to our desktop with Microsoft Copilot, who knows what Apple is going to be releasing with their Ajax model, but regardless, the same way that we search the Internet hourly. Now, if you are a knowledge worker working at a desk, you will be prompting hourly soon. So you need to understand that prompting is a skill set and you need to learn it. Do not look for shortcuts. All right, enough wind up. Let's talk about the five biggest mistakes. Well, you could probably already guess mistake number one is using copy and paste super prompts. The bane of my existence, y'. All. Are you still running in circles trying to figure out how to actually grow your business with AI? Maybe your company has been tinkering with large language models for a year or more, but can't really get traction to find ROI on gen AI. Hey, this is Jordan Wilson, host of this very podcast. Companies like Adobe, Microsoft and Nvidia have partnered with us because they trust our expertise in educating the masses around generative AI to get ahead. And some of the most innovative companies in the country hire us to help with their AI strategy and to train hundreds of their employees on how to use Gen AI. So whether you're looking for ChatGPT training for thousands or just need help building your front end AI strategy, you can partner with us too. Just like some of the biggest companies in the world do. Go to your everyday AI.com partner to get in contact with our team or you can just click on the partner section of our website. We'll help you stop running in those AI circles and help get your team ahead and build a straight path to ROI on gen. Because we all see these. We all see these, right? These things that say 25 insanely useful prompts, right, that'll change your life or blah blah blah, right? These follow me everywhere now because here's what happens and here's why you should never use these. All of these people on LinkedIn and Twitter, hell yeah. I think the hot take Tuesday is carrying over into a Wednesday. They're creating these useless prompt books, right? And they want you to either buy them or give an email for them. They don't Work, they're garbage. Copy and paste prompts do not work. Is it better than nothing? Absolutely right. But you cannot use a copy and paste prompt and get anything higher than a B, than a B minus, right? If you want actual quality, if you want something that is human level, if you want something that you can actually use without spending hours massaging the content or whatever the output is, you can't use copy and paste prompts, period. So stop falling for all these tricks. These are just literally, this is online marketing 101 from the early 2000s. Stop giving your email and buying people's or buying prompt books are using these prompts, right? It's fine if you're using it for an idea starter, but prompting is a skill. If you're just trying to use copy and paste prompts, all you are doing is screwing your future self over, right? Because when you are having to prompt on an hourly basis, yeah, it's nice. Have a prompt library, right? Like if your, if your job is repetitive, there's probably some type of prompts that you will be able to use consistently. But it's always better to create an expert chat. It works better. We're going to get into that in a second. All right, so that's mistake number one. And also as you're, as you're going, as we're going along here, if you have questions, please let me know. Drop them in the chat. I gotta make sure to include, include the awesome everyday audience. Sometimes when I get in a rant like Ben here. What's going on, Ben? So Ben saying initially most of us were not good using Google to search. Did we get better asking Google or did Google get better at answering? Likely it'll be the same with Gen AI. That's a great observation, Ben. I think the difference is for the most part Google never changed the rules of searching, right? Even going back to the first days of Google, you could always do Boolean search. I guess the only major change in the last 20 plus years is being able to search with an image. But for the most part, searches functionality has not changed. Whereas large language models functionality is changing rapidly. Right? It's no longer text to text, it's text to photo. It's text to video. It's video to photo. Video to text, video to photo, right? So the functions of large language models are changing in a much different way than search. All right, so mistake number two, looking for outputs versus building skill sets. All right, so so many times when people are prompting, they're looking at a large language model the wrong way. Okay. They're saying, oh, I don't want to do X right now, so let me just jump into Chat GPT. Nothing wrong with that. But again, you're going to get C plus B minus results. Okay. And if you want that human level quality, you have to change your mindset when working inside of Chat GPT or any other large language model. Right. I just, I just gave a speech at the AI Summit in New York City, which I think is one of the biggest AI summits in the world, and I talked obviously about Chat GPT and I had so many people come up afterwards and say I've been using Chat GPT and other large language models just to get an output. Right. And, and, and that in the long run is such a time waster. Right. Because you're just going to click new chat, you're going to go in there and you're looking for, you know, a new policy for your HR department or you're looking for a response for an email or whatever it is. Right. And is that going to save you some time? Yes, but not as much as you think, because copy and copy and paste zero shot prompting is not going to get you anything of quality. So you're still going to have to probably spend some time on the back end, quote unquote, fixing it. Right. If you change your mindset and start to build skill sets inside of Chat GPT, which is what we teach in the prime prompt polish course, that's when you can actually get usable, consistently high quality outputs from Chat GPT because you build a skill set that way. Yeah, more on that later. More on that later. Yeah, because we've been trained kind of like what Ben was talking about. Yeah. We've been using search engines for a quarter century. We've always been trained one input, one output. Right. And that is not how a large language model works. It's not. Can it give you one output with one input? Yes. Right. But that's the whole concept of, you know, without getting too technical. But we kind of talked about it yesterday on the, the Google Gemini, you know, when they're comparing, you know, five shot prompts to 32 shot chain of thought. Right. Without getting too technical, you always get better results. Right. If we're talking about zero shot, five shot, whatever. A shot is essentially a back and forth or an example. And obviously every single benchmark ever shows you get much better, much better results on all of these benchmarks when you're, you know, five shot versus zero shot, 32 shot versus five shot. Right. So think you should Be prompting the same way you shouldn't be zero shotting, which is just putting in a prompt and looking for a response without giving examples, without going back and forth and forth. You need to be building a skill set going back and forth. Not just one input, one output. That is a search engine, y'. All. That is not a large language model. Stop using it like this. It's all the fault of these people on social media that have these, they have these pods, these engagement groups and they say, all right, I'm going to post my prompt book today. Make sure all 50 of you say this is the best thing ever. And then all of you people out there think it's the best thing ever. And then you try these copy and paste prompts. They absolutely stink. And then eventually you come to the PPP course and you say, oh, I know how to use a large language model now just skip it. Just come straight to the course or just stop using copy and paste prompts. All right, number three, not using skill based chats, right? So those two kind of go hand in hand. But let me give an example. And this is literally taking a page out of our free prime prompt polish training. So again, if you want access, just say ppp. I'll tell you how to access. But you need to treat a new chat inside of chat GPT like an employee that you are trying to train. Okay? So even think of, you know, these long super mega prompts, right? They're like, you know, five pages long, you know, because someone out there is selling those. Stop buy them. Stop buying them. But that is the equivalent of if you have a brand new employee and you throw a giant 200 page training manual on their desk and then instantly say, now go do your job. Right? I use this analogy all the time, but it's the best way to illustrate how you should be prompting. If you do that, that employee is going to fail and you are going to fail in your role overseeing that employee. So you need to have that same mindset that you are overseeing an expert chat inside of ChatGPT. Because when you start a new chat inside of ChatGPT, it both knows nothing and it knows everything at the same time. All right? So you need to go through. And this is the priming, right? Without giving away our entire course here, but this is the priming phase. When we talk about prime prompt polish, you need to go through an onboarding phase, just like you would with a new employee. Going back and forth, back and forth and onboarding, training, reinforcement, learning, feedback, testing, knowledge sharing. All right? And that is where you come up with this. Expert chats. This is another thing that we teach, but this is just an easy way, kind of like a marketing and messaging thing. But every single chat that you start inside ChatGPT should be an expert at one very specific skill set. Okay. You don't just start a chat and say, all right, this is my Wednesday chat and I'm going to go in there for anything. Or you don't just start a new chat. For every single prompt, you build a skill set and use that skill set, that one very specific skill set. Whenever you need it, you scroll down and you say, all right, here's my research and analysis skill set that's based on this element of my role. Here is my creative copywriting skill set for email marketing for my company. Right? Every single chat is a skill set and you need to train it accordingly. All right, mistake number four. Yeah, like Tara says, onboarding. Onboarding LinkedIn user. Sorry, I can't see your name examples. I don't, I don't want this to accidentally turn into an hour long, an hour long show. But yeah, we give examples in our free prime prompt polish course. All right, so mistake number four. Saying you're an expert in blank with blank years of experience. This is hilarious. This is hilarious. Guess what? That does absolutely nothing. That does absolutely nothing. Right? A large language model has the entirety of the open Internet, the closed Internet, literary works, movies, right? It has one, you know, GPT4 has 1.8 trillion parameters. So saying or telling chat GPT that it is an expert with blank years of experience does about nothing. Right? Go, go test this on your own. Do, do that version and then start a new chat and go through prime prompt polish and you'll see every single time by training a skill set, you will wipe the floor with saying you're an expert in this with blank years of experience. Here's why. And I use this example in the course, right? Let's say copywriting to say you're an expert level copywriter with 20 years of experience. Okay, Remember how I just said large language models are trained on the entirety and the history of the open Internet and the closed Internet? There's a lot of people putting out information online that say, hey, I'm A copywriter with 20 years of experience. With 30 years of experience. Here's all of the tips you need. Guess what? A lot of people out there putting information out on the Internet claiming to be experts stink. Stink. So if you are that open ended with a prompt inside of chat GPT without giving Examples, right? So like saying, hey, these are the three copywriters you should be emulating. These are the three copywriting styles you should be. You should be using. These are the three copywriting conversions or the three copywriting outputs that we need out of our copy and giving examples of all of those. If you just say you're an expert with blank years of experience, that's why, that's why you're not getting anything usable out of ChatGPT, or you're frustrated, or you're like, oh, AI won't take our jobs, look how bad the output is. Well, you're not doing it correctly. That's number four. All right, Cecilia, thanks for the question, Cecilia. Asking how does the building of the skill set of your CHAT affect the usage of tokens? Yes, great question. It eats your tokens up, right? So, no, Chat GPT does not have 128,000 token memory. Sam Altman on November 7th said that GPT4 Turbo was coming to chat GPT. GPT4 Turbo has 128,000 tokens. I just tested this last week. I haven't tested it yet this week, so unless it's changed, but I doubt it has. But right now, that's a great point, Cecilia, because when you are building a skill set, what you are probably doing is you are sending a lot of text back and forth. So all of that text back and forth essentially eats up Chat GPT's memory, right? Now, ChatGPT plus, if you're on the paid version, has a memory of 32,000 tokens, which I believe is about 25,000 is words, give or take, right? So at a certain point, Chat GPT will start to forget things. So, yes, as you are building that skill set, in theory, you are starting to eat away at chat GPT's memory. But that's why in our free Prime Prompt Polish course, we teach you ways around that. But great question, Cecilia. All right, so like I said, number four is saying you're an expert in blank with blank years of experience. Garbage doesn't help. All right, and number five. And here we go, looking at CHAT GPT as a shortcut. All right, here's the thing, and I'm kind of twisting this one on its head, Chad. GPT is the ultimate shortcut, right? To grow your company, to grow your career, but you have to build the road. You have to build that shortcut, okay? You can't just copy and paste something in or do a halfway job of prompting. Okay? What I. What I like to tell people, again, think of it the exact same as an employee. New employee comes in who has knows nothing and the ability to know everything at the same time. Right? That's the thing. If you train chat GPT the right way, if you use it the right way, it is better than humans at most knowledge based tests. Right? We've seen that with these recent benchmarks. You know, GPT4 allegedly Google Gemini, ultra large language models are getting better than humans at knowledge based tests. But only if you use it the right way. Okay, so it is an employee that is smarter than the smartest human who sits down at your desk and everyone just wants to throw a giant 200 page training manual at it and say go. Because it's a shortcut, it's smart, it can work for me, right? Yes, but you have to put the work in right. Prompting isn't just about trying to get the best quality something as quickly as possible. It is training a replacement for one of your skill sets. Using chat GPT correctly is replicating one of your skill sets. It is automating one of the things that you do every day. Okay, it is systemizing your manual work on autopilot. But you have to put in the work, you have to do it correctly, you have to build the shortcut and then once you do, then chat GPT is a cheat code. But most of y' all just want to put in copy and paste prompts. So no, to wrap things up. No, Chat GPT does not suck your prompts, do you? Stop reposting those people on social media. Stop buying into using other copy and paste prompts. Like I said, if you're brand new and if you just want to see the capabilities, it's an okay start. And yes, Cs get degrees as the saying here in the US goes. But all those copy and paste prompts are going to do the best case scenarios get you a C. If you want to get to the point where chat GPT can work at the same level as you, where it does become a true shortcut, where you can start to truly automate your work, where you can start to, you know, 5x10x your outputs and, and get usable content in return, you have to go through the proper channels. You have to build it up. And that's where our free prime prompt polish course comes in. Right? People already said it here, I didn't say it right. Tara said it 100ppp. Katie said it. Other people said, you know, we've had thousands, we've literally had now thousands of people take our PPP course from entrepreneurs solopreneurs to Fortune 100 business leaders. Yeah, we've literally had people from top 20 companies in the world take our free Prime Prompt Polish course and give five star reviews. Right? It's free. There's no upsell at the end. This is why I do this, right? I firmly and truly believe that prompting isn't something that should be smoke in marketing mirrors online. It is an essential skill set. And it can be hard to learn the basics right, because in the end someone's always trying to sell you some crap. Or yeah, you can kind of learn how to prompt from a big company, but in the end they're really just giving you, you know, what's going to work best for their systems or they're pushing you into their system. So with Everyday AI, with our free Prime Prompt Polish Course course, you get an unbiased free way to learn an essential skill set. And we do it twice a week, right? We do it Tuesdays and Thursdays. So if you want access to that, just let me know. Thank you all for joining us. I hope you learned that no chat, GPS chat, GPT doesn't suck. Your prompts do please. This was helpful. Share this Share this Post Share this Podcast with a friend Leave us a rating if you can, but more than anything, if you haven't. My gosh, go to your everydayai.com, sign up for that free daily newsletter and we'll see you back tomorrow and every day with Everyday AI. Thanks y'. All.
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