What is “Priming”?

Get the cheat sheet: ChatGPT prompts and tips for sales pros

Transcript

Ever heard the term “priming” in reference to AI tools like Chatgpt and wondered what it’s all about? Let’s do a quick overview.

Priming is the process of providing context or setting a specific tone at the beginning of a conversation. This practice helps guide the AI model to generate responses that are more aligned with what you’re looking for.

Why is priming necessary? Well, for a few reasons.

First, it’s needed for contextual accuracy: priming helps Chatgpt understand the context better, so it can give you more relevant answers. So, you’ll have less editing to do later.

Second, it helps Chatgpt get to know better the style and tone you have in mind.

And finally, it’s the best way to get tailored responses. State your main objectives–to inform, persuade, or entertain. That way, AI can tailor its response accordingly. 
Priming is pretty easy, so long as you have clarity of what you want. Here are 3 main things to remember when you ask Chatgpt to write text for you:

1- Set the writing style: Tell Chatgpt to adopt a specific writing style–your favorite thought leader for example.

2- Set the persona: Program it to generate answers from the perspective of a specific persona, such as a potential customer.

3- Set the audience: If you’re asking Chatgpt to write something for you, establish the intended reader so it knows what points to focus on.
Finally, let’s go over a few priming best practices:

First, remember to be accurate: choose adjectives that precisely describe what you’re looking for. For example, instead of saying “nice tone,” you could say “a sincere tone.”

Second, provide additional information: You can always copy and paste text from social media, video transcripts, or articles to help Chatgpt better understand the situation and what you’re asking for.

Lastly, you can choose to be very specific and provide an example or an actual template of what you need.
Here’s an example prompt, providing Chatgpt with instructions and a structure for creating a presentation. Provide the title or topic of the presentation, tell chatgpt who the presentation is for and the topics per slide.

Here’s what it might look like with actual info.
And this is what we got when feeding the prompt to Chatgpt. Of course from here you can keep on refining and perfecting.
Let’s continue to the next section where we dive deeper into understanding priming through concrete techniques and examples.