My recent focus has been on Generative AI, specifically mastering the art of prompting. As someone who’s always trying to catch up with the rapid pace of tech, I’ve found GenAI tools to be game-changers. I’m an introvert, and honestly, writing isn’t easy. Just starting a sentence can take forever, and being a perfectionist doesn’t help either. However, with GenAI tools, I’ve found a non-judgmental partner that’s always ready to help.

Recently, I’ve been exploring ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, You.com, and Perplexity. My trick? I use the same prompt on all of them, then see which one sounds “more like me.” It’s great to just dump what’s in my brain into a prompt and not worry about overthinking. From there, I work with the tool to set the tone and structure, and even get feedback on some changes I want to make. Reprompting was one of the toughest parts of my learning. Initially, I would manually tweak the first output myself, which was very time-consuming. Mastering this skill actually took more time than learning the initial prompting itself. Once I achieve a response that feels authentically me – something I am comfortable sharing with the world – I use ZeroGPT to check how much of my text is flagged as AI-generated. I try to keep this under 30%. Otherwise, I continue to reprompt.

My main goal is to keep my voice mine. I never want to lose what I’m trying to say, which is why I spend a lot of time making sure that as I use these AI tools, my voice doesn’t get lost.

In April 2024, Gemini released the first guide on prompting, which was awesome! It helped me understand a lot of things better, and I was able to apply them right away.

Another issue I encountered was with the AI tool Claude, which many users loved for its human-like qualities. However, I found it was a bit too extroverted for me. I researched it and found that Claude is designed with certain traits; although these traits are good, I just have a hard time with the character. This mismatch was a unique problem; no one else in my LinkedIn network felt this way, and I have no idea what the “right” thing to do is. Is it me? Is it Claude? Is it us—are we just not compatible?

These experiences really highlight a bigger picture problem with generative AI: even though these tools are getting easier to use and more people can get their hands on them, finding the right fit for your personal style and understanding the little nuances of how to interact with them can still be really tricky.

Honestly, I know there are so many opportunities with generative AI, but sometimes I feel like I can’t fully understand what they all might be. Maybe it’s a bit of a millennial curse – we spent part of our lives without all this tech, and now that we have it, it is sometimes hard to imagine stuff at one point we thought was so foreign and not achievable. Every time a new application is released, I’m amazed but also a bit lost about its full capabilities. I’ve noticed that tech companies often aren’t completely transparent about this. We hear about AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), but it’s not always clear what that fully means.

Despite these uncertainties, I believe there’s a huge opportunity for individuals to use these tools. Many of them are free and user-friendly. Initially, I assumed that like me, many others were also quickly adopting these tools like I was, but looking at the stats, I’ve realized that a large number of people still aren’t using these tools. This surprises me, and I think there’s a big gap here that needs to be analyzed. Why aren’t more people using these tools (I feel my productivity has increased by atleast 40%)? Is it lack of awareness, fear of the new, or something else?