Think of AI as an intelligent person who has no specific information.

They can do something with decent quality if you ask them, but to make it incredible, you need to give them specific instructions and details.

Writing an AI prompt that is 1 sentence long is like having a Formula 1 car driving on a street with a 15mph limit.

Of course, asking one-sentence questions is an incredible way to dig deeper into responses, but expecting an AI to give you artisan quality work in one shot is silly.

If you are great at writing prompts, you can use almost any AI model well.

So, here's a short guide to writing a better prompt:

1) Role

Example: "You are an expert at crafting viral X/Twitter posts."

First, give kAI a role depending on the task you want to accomplish.

If you are using kAI as a study partner, then give it the role of a PhD level professor that understands the nuances of your topic.

If you are using kAI for research, give it a similar role.

2) Task

Example: "I am going to give you a piece of my writing to analyze, pull content ideas from, and turn them into engaging posts that bring in followers. You will adapt the reference writing's style, voice, tone, and topics to everything we discuss below. You will write 12 of your highest quality posts from this."

Second, give kAI a brief description of what you are going to have it do.

This can be anywhere from one sentence to two paragraphs. Experiment!

3) Specifications

This is where things get set yourself apart.

You are the expert here. If you are not a good writer, kAI will probably not be a good writer (unless you use our prompts!)

AI is only as good and unique as the parts of your brain that you give it.

So, for writing something like social posts, I can give kAI a mini course on how I personally write them, in detail:

• Use the reference to pull the most relatable ideas from. Talk about the idea, not people or specific concepts.
• The posts must state or imply a pain point.
• Avoid being too clever.
• Each post should be able to be understood without any prior context.
• The posts should be 280 characters in length maximum.
• Include 4 one-sentence posts, 4 multi-line paragraph posts, and 4 list posts.
• The hook should contain a big idea, pain point, desired outcome, or even something like a statistic or interesting fact.
• Start with words or phrases like "you," "if you," "most people," "the greatest," "the worst," and other power phrases or words.
• Pull inspiration from popular hooks.
• Be confident and have conviction in what you say.
• Be polarizing and pick a side.
• Exaggerate points for impact.
• Do not end the posts with simple advice. End them with novel perspectives that few people have heard before.

Those are all parts I include in the prompt. Some of them are specific to the task i want to accomplish because I want a variety of posts that I can use as inspiration.

You can probably get great results with less than that, but I wanted to include that example for perspective.

As another example when using kAI as a study partner, you can keep it short and sweet: "Design a condensed learning program that focuses on core principles, essential techniques, and practice hacks. Give me 1 YouTube video, 1 book, and 1 article to study for each part of the problem."

4) Examples

In Kortex, you can add sources like YouTube videos and PDFs to your library.

You can reference both documents in your workspace and sources by typing @ or + while talking to kAI.

When writing a prompt, you want to give it a reference, example or template to pull information from.

When writing social posts, I want to keep the writing in my own voice, so I can @ a previous article of mine and say, "Use @article to match my voice, tone, and style."

I can also ask kAI to pull content ideas from a specific source or document.

On top of that, I can include templates to emulate for how to write social posts. I would do this by pasting 4-5 of my previous tweets, like:

"The greatest skill is writing:

• 1) It forces you to articulate your value
• 2) It is the foundation of all media
• 3) It can be repurposed to any other medium
• 4) It enhances any other skill you acquire
• 5) It brings immense mental clarity

When you learn to write, you learn to think. When you learn to think, you become irreplaceable."

This would also be the time to include specific documents or sources you want to study (if you are using kAI as a study partner).

5) Response

Optionally, you can choose how kAI responds to you.

Example: "Please put the posts on their own separate lines. Do not number the posts, organize them by having a line with a "—" between them."

This may take a few tries to get right, but your best work with AI comes from iteration with your prompting.

So keep experimenting, and feel free to ask questions in Discord at any time.

If you need a place to get started with prompting, you can use our simple prompt document and duplicate it to your workspace!

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