💬 Talk bot to me

Last week we said: It’s not what you ask. It’s how you ask it. We weren’t kidding.

Prompting is how you talk to AI, and more importantly, how you get it to talk back in a way that’s helpful, accurate and occasionally even brilliant. Whether you’re writing a press release, building a playlist or fixing your dating bio (hi again), the prompt is everything.

Vague prompt = vague bot. Clear, specific, maybe even a little charming? Chef’s kiss.

 🎯 Prompt like you mean it

According to MIT Sloan (MIT’s business school, not a TikTok account), good prompts start with knowing what you want. Be detailed. Be direct. Give examples.

And please stop starting with “Can you tell me a little about…” unless you’re time-traveling back to a 1998 book report.

Want ChatGPT to act like your resume coach? Say so. Need a caption in the drama of a Real Housewives reunion (is that still a thing)? Spell it out.

The more context you give, the less time you’ll spend yelling “that’s not what I meant!” into the void.

_{Credit: Say What You See}

🪄 It’s not hacking. It’s communication.

You don’t need to be a prompt engineer to write better prompts. You just need a plan:

• Structure your ask.
  “Give me 3 options with pros and cons.”

• Set a role.
  “You’re a tech journalist writing for Gen Z.”

• Define a tone.
  “Make it smart but sarcastic.”

Think of it like briefing a very fast, very literal intern. If you wouldn’t say “just do something cool” to a new hire, don’t say it to the bot.

🧪 Want to test your prompt chops? Try Google Arts & Culture’s “Say What You See” (pictured above) experiment.

📘 For more prompting fun, Grammarly’s guide is solid. Or go full nerd with Google’s 68-pager on prompt engineering (shoutout to Reddit’s u/LinkFrost for the link).

🤖 Final Bot thought

Prompting is a soft skill in a hard-tech world. It’s part clarity, part empathy, part knowing what you want before you even open the chat box.

And yes… sometimes saying please helps. (Not just for tone. As we talked about in last week’s Bot Hurt, OpenAI’s CEO confirmed that all that polite language burns millions in compute power. Our bad.)

🗣️ BotTalk: Paging Dr. Bot

The government agency that approves your meds, inspects your lunch meat and lets your skincare legally claim “revitalizing” is rolling out AI tools across the agency.

The Food and Drug Administration announced that after a successful pilot this past spring, AI is ready to speed up science.

Regulatory reviews that used to take days could now take minutes. Generative AI can summarize clinical data, highlight red flags and maybe even read between the lines.

The FDA says it’s about helping scientists, not replacing them. But c’mon — if you were a human reviewer and your new coworker didn’t take lunch breaks and could process 400 documents an hour? You might feel a little... bot hurt.

🚀 Coming up next week …

AI vs. common sense. Glue on pizza. Raw chicken in the toaster. Bots have been serving up some questionable advice lately.

We’re digging into the difference between smart answers and straight-up nonsense—and why trusting AI might require more human sense than ever.

Subscribe now before your search engine suggests you microwave your phone.