GPT-4 Prompt to 10x Your Writing

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For today's piece, we're looking at one of my favourite GPT-4 prompts to help you become a better writer (by writing less).

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How to 10x Your Writing with GPT-4

GPT-4 / OpenAI

It's been a little over a week since GPT-4 was released. (If you're new to all of this or just want a refresher, check out my primer on GPT-4 from last week here.)

Needless to say, I'm doing more with less as I operate with my 'copilot for life' by my side. From drafting legal documents to summarising my notes, GPT-4's capabilities are literally endless.

My co-founder Alexander (yes, we both have the same name) put up a great tweet highlighting what this means for advancing us towards the singularity.

What is the singularity you ask?

The technological singularity—or simply the singularity—is a hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization.

Where does GPT-4 place us on this graph? My best guess—we're edging closer and closer to the intersection.

Writing Threads with GPT-4

One use case I've been loving lately is using GPT-4 to help me write threads on Twitter. A thread is simply a series of tweets that reply to one another—usually to break down a topic or tell a story. Here's one I posted yesterday on the release of Microsoft 365's AI Copilot:

But what if you'd never written a thread before? What if you wanted to create something from nothing? That's where GPT-4 comes in.

We're going to use chained prompting. This is where we feed GPT-4 pieces of information for it to understand something before we ask it to complete a task.

In this case, we want it to become a thread writing expect. How do we do that? It first needs to understand the ins and outs of what a great thread comprises of.

Now GPT-4 has a grasp of the basics. It's time we take things up a notch by learning your writing style. This is something which GPT-3.5 struggled with. To do so, I'm going to feed GPT-4 two threads I've previously written.

Notice I get GPT-4 to reply "OK" after each prompt to make sure it knows it's still in the 'learning' phase. It's like having the metal railings up when you go bowling to prevent your ball from going in the gutter—in this case, GPT-4 jumping the mark and starting to write the thread right off the bat.

Now it's time to make the magic happen. GPT-4 has learned your writing tone through the examples. After the last example, finish with:

Now I want you to write me a thread using the writing style you’ve just learned.

I will tell you the topic in the next prompt.

Reply “OK” if you understand.

As you can see, GPT-4 understood the hook, structure and tone. It gives you a robust framework and a serious leg-up when writing about a new topic. I hope this helps you get past the blank page, whilst not letting it substitute your creativity.

Let AI augment you so you can do more with less.

To round things off, I'll leave you with one question: what can you do with GPT-4? Or perhaps a better question—what can you not do with GPT-4?

Reply to this email and let me know your favourite use cases.

Let me know what you think

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That’s all for today friends!

Thanks for reading and I’ll catch you next for some Sunday Signal.

Alex

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