Prompt Engineering Word of the Week: Temperature




We were recently in negotiations with a gaming client who wanted us to handle all the blog content and corresponding social media posts for their brand-new website.

Luckily, we have a gamer on staff who would like nothing more than to write about and play video games for a living.

So he was thrilled with this first assignment. However, I warned him ahead of time: "We haven't nailed this client yet, so the quality of the first post we provide them will go a long way toward nailing this company down as a new client.

"In other words," I continued, "I need your very best work."

Of course, I always want everyone's best work. Still, adding that line underscores how important this one blog post was.

By the next night, I had the assignment back – and immediately saw some significant problems with the writing.

The writer used ChatGPT and various other tools to help him write the post, but most of the work was all him. So, to get readers excited and show his enthusiasm for that particular topic, he included plenty of adjectives in every sentence and section, including the subheads.

Like, a lot of adjectives.

So many that my first thought was that he used ChatGPT to write the entire piece, with no human intervention afterward, to clean it up and massage the copy.

Nope, he was just "really excited."

Easy fix with ChatGPT

At first, the writer was concerned that he'd have to start from scratch and write the entire post all over again.

"That's totally unnecessary," I told him, "just run it through ChatGPT and tell it to rewrite your blog post but decrease the temperature by 50 percent."

So what the heck does that mean?

When someone asks to "lower the temperature" of a blog post or any piece of content, they want the tone or intensity of the content dialed down. That could refer to several aspects, such as:

  • Emotional intensity: The content might be too passionate, aggressive, or argumentative. Lowering the temperature would make the content more neutral, balanced, or less confrontational.
  • Controversial topics or opinions: The post might be dealing with hot-button issues or expressing strong opinions that could polarize the audience. Lowering the temperature would make the content less controversial, more consensus-oriented, or avoid taking strong stances.
  • Salesy language: If the content is too promotional, full of "hard-sell" language, lowering the temperature would mean making it less salesy and more informative or educational.
  • Too descriptive: If a text is deemed too "hot" or high-temperature, it might be overly enthusiastic, excessively detailed, or laden with too many adjectives and adverbs, leading to a more embellished or "flowery" style.

And do you know what's a big red flag for AI detectors? Content with too high of a temperature.

So, when the writer copied and pasted his first draft into ChatGPT and asked it to rewrite the post by lowering the temperature by 50 percent, he told the language bot to tone down one or more of those aspects significantly. The goal is to produce a new version of the blog post that's still descriptive but comes across as more balanced, less salesy and more professional.

No problem, ChatGPT told the writer. He got the revised version back within minutes, spent another 10 minutes cleaning it up, then submitted it for review before sending it to the potential new client for approval.

The good news? The client loved the post and just placed a big order for us.

Looks like that writer will have a lot more assignments coming his way in the coming weeks and months – as long as he can keep the temperature down in his posts.


#ai #chatbot #GPT4 #promptengineer #promptengineering #aiprompts #generativeai #llm #blogging #blogger #contentmarketing

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JakeGPT is the owner and operator of JakeGPT1973.com, an AI-powered digital marketing company based out of Carrollton, Texas. Email him at jakegpt@jakegpt1973.com.

 

Location: Carrollton, TX, USA

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