Want better answers from ChatGPT or Gemini? Here’s how to tweak your prompts the right way

TechRadar AI Week 2025

(Image credit: OpenAI/Microsoft/Google)

There are plenty of situations where you want AI to get creative. This could be for producing images, stories, ideas for a presentation or even generating dynamite business ideas. In all cases, the more contextual details you give the chatbot about your situation, the better.

Best picks for you

So, instead of hitting ‘Create image’ then typing some keywords like, “desert, night, animals”, think about what you want in the scene. What are the objects, people and setting? Then think about the style it should be in and the mood of the scene. It’s also better if you write in full sentences, rather than brief keywords

Imagine that you are briefing a real artist on the painting you’d like them to draw. So, in this example you could say something like, “Create an image of a desert at night, with a camel looking out onto a pyramid as lightning strikes, lighting up the entire scene. The image should be as photorealistic as possible.”

(Image credit: OpenAI)

You’ll get much better results with a descriptive approach, but you can take it further. If you want images of people to look realistic, then another great tip for text prompts is to add some real world camera settings, like “Close-up portrait, 85mm lens, soft golden hour lighting”.

(Image credit: OpenAI)

When it comes to creative writing, it’s exactly the same: The more detailed and specific instructions you can provide in your interactions, the better. So, instead of writing a simple prompt like, “Write me an essay on the witches in Macbeth”, you could specify a word length, and tell ChatGPT the major themes you want the essay to hit, and also the reading level of the audience you are going for.

Sign up for breaking news, reviews, opinion, top tech deals, and more.

So, you could type something like, “Write me a 1,000-word essay about what affect the witches have in Macbeth, specifically on his levels of ambition and on the interplay of the fantastic and the real throughout the play. You should be writing for a secondary school level of education.”

From a prompt like this you get a much better result.

In all cases, you can keep refining the answer that the AI gives you until you get exactly what you want – a prompt isn’t a one-shot and you’re done kind of deal. So, for an image you could say, “Make the image look more like a painting by Johannes Vermeer”, or for the essay above you could type “I’d like the essay to also consider the themes of decay in Macbeth”, and ChatGPT will refine its results for you.

Don’t miss these

(Image credit: Future)

Get your chatbot to channel its inner Steve Jobs. (Image credit: Getty Images/Rick Smolan)

When it comes to having a conversation with a chatbot, you might like to set up a roleplay situation where you ask it to imagine that it is an expert in something and ask it to respond as an expert would. So, for example, you could say, “You are an expert in the field, now tell me 3 things that I should know to start with”.

Since the chatbot appears to know the sum of all human knowledge, asking it to act like an expert in a field might sound counterintuitive, but it does alter the results you get with it quite a lot. Give it a try.

Alternatively, if there’s a particular person, living or dead, who inspired you then you can ask the chatbot to become that person and have a conversation with you. This can be surprisingly effective. Writing, “You are Steve Jobs, not just inspired by him, but you contain all his knowledge and experience, now ask me why I haven’t changed the world yet”, can lead to some very interesting conversations!

The right prompt can make all the difference. (Image credit: Getty Images/Surasak Suwanmake)

There are a few phrases you can use in chatbots that I’ve found particularly useful, and can be applied to varied situations. These have produced such good results for me that I think it’s worth going through them here:

Using the phrase: “Use the entire history of our interactions – every message exchanged, every topic discussed, every nuance in our conversations”, at the start of a prompt can be a good way of making sure that the chatbot will take into account everything you’ve told it before.

Specifically asking the chatbot to “Avoid generic responses” is also a good tip. If you want to go further, then asking it to “deliver a detailed, logical, well-argued response” is also a good tip if you want a longer reply.

Finally, if you are trying to use the chatbot to help you break a habit you find difficult to break, then you might like to add something like, “Recognise that I might be resistant to your initial suggestions or find the subject difficult to talk about, and adjust your approach accordingly”.