How to to stop having a "lazy" ChatGPT (with examples)

I think everyone sometimes has troubles with a lazy ChatGPT, but often it's not lazy but it's receiving the wrong instructions.

It can especially be lazy if you ask for a big project like 'create a web-app' or 'write a blog-post'. And obviously those are not good prompt, but that's besides the point.

ChatGPT is always trying to provide you a helpful answer in one answer, and since ChatGPT has a limited output window, it will truncate your text to make everything fit.

For example, I asked ChatGPT to write me a blog post on LLamas. The prompt was:

Write a blog post of 2000 words on the majestic Llama 

As a result I got one complete blog post of 786 words. It didn't even mention it was 1200+ words shy of my original request.

Now I used the exact same prompt with a small modifier. I made sure ChatGPT shouldn't worry about it's output window and that I'm fine with doing it in subsequent steps. The prompt I used:

Write a blog post of 2000 words on the majestic Lama.

Relax, take a deep breath and take your time. Don't worry about your token limit. We can do it in multiple steps!

This time ChatGPT generated a blog post of 1605 words and it in total of 3 steps. Still, almost 400 words shy of our goal but massive improvement by just using a single line.
Alternatively: break it down yourself in multiple steps
Another way to 'bypass' a lazy ChatGPT is to pretty much inverse the process and you break it down multiple steps by giving subsequent steps.

This is the best approach but it will require more time on structuring your prompt.

For example, instead of asking to 'create a blog post on Llamas', we first decide the outline of the blog posts and then instruct ChatGPT to create one chapter at a time. First introduction, chapter 1, chapter 2, etc.

You could also combine both modifiers to get the best possible results:

Your goal is to write a blog post on the majestic LLama

Your first task is to write 'Chapter 1: The origin of the Llama' Take your time, and don't worry about your output window. We can do it in multiple steps if necessary.

Because also broken-down tasks can be truncated if it's too long for ChatGPT.

Hopefully that was helpful!

If you like what you read and you want more prompts and other practical AI stuff then consider subscribing to my newsletter: every week new ways to work smarter with AI.

Also here for any questions / comments / critique that you might have 🫡