Everyone and their uncle has their 100 best ChatGPT prompts or their 500,000,000 best prompts for Nano Banana. If you haven’t seen these yet, you will.
And, truth be told, we have our own prompt guides that we put out there, so I’m not against them.
I say “be careful” because the prompt collections rarely tell you that they are mainly useful for beginners. Sometimes, absolute beginners.
They can be very useful when you are just getting started, and if you never move on to more detailed prompts, you will only get very generic responses back. What some are now calling “AI slop”.
I’ll give you some examples of prompts that you might see in these collections:
Again, these can be a really good place to start if you’ve never used AI chatbots before and don’t even know what to ask. Each of these lack context, clarity, examples, guardrails, audience, etc., and so many other things that help the AI tool make sense of what you want.
To help make this more concrete, I will rewrite the first bullet with a non-beginner prompt:
Re-write this email with a professional tone [email]
Professional emails have clear subject lines, proper greetings, are less than 150 words, state their purpose in the body of the message, have a polite closing, and add my 3rd email signature
Here are examples of professionally written emails - [example 1] [example 2] [example 3]
Here are examples of non-professionally written emails - [example 1] [example 2] [example 3]
Do not use these words or phrases - [list of words/phrases not to use]
Ask me clarifying questions to gather any missing context before you start
See the difference? If you have a prompt pack that has messages structured like this, then I apologize to their authors.