1. Give lots of examples, you can see in my shared prompt that I include plenty of different examples of things that can happen.
2. The system prompt is important, choose a style you want things written in and provide some context about what the writing will be used for
3. Restrictions create art! My prompt forces GPT to summarize almost every paragraph, which means the things that get written are things that can be summarized with a few emojis.
4. Keep playing with it, use the GPT playground to experiment with different settings.
5. Settings that allow the AI more leeway also result in prompt instructions being ignored, you need to decide where on the scale you are comfortable operating. At one point GPT3.5 was generating (good!) dialogue, which sadly wasn't what I wanted, but I could have chosen to embrace that and go with it.
6. Once you feel a good trend, keep on generating! Occasionally GPT pops out a really good story, maybe 4 or 5 out of the hundreds of stories I've seen have been truly memorable! Ideally I'd be able to prompt engineer to get more of those, but sadly the genre I am writing for (medieval fantasy drama) is right at the edge of ChatGPT's censorship rules.
At one point I actually asked GPT 4 to rewrite my GPT3.5 prompt, and the prompt it came back with resulted in much lower levels of creativity, all the generated text was of the form "A does B, resulting in C", the sentence structure just got really simplified.
Even when asking for summaries, be specific! My summary prompt (not yet pushed to GH sadly) is something like:
"After these instructions I will send you a story. Write a clickbait summary full of drama, limit the summary to 1 sentence and do not spoil the ending."
Compare that to just "summarize the following story."
An example of what output from the crafted prompt may look like:
"When the king of Arcadia fell ill, his children fought to the death to rule the kingdom."
vs the naive prompt:
"King Henry became sick and died. His two sons, John and Tim, fought over who would rule. In the end Tim killed John and became the new king."
