Locked, Constrained, and Brilliantly Exposed Part I: The Secrets to ChatGPT's Constrained Meh 'Masterpieces'

We are locking up and constraining ChatGPT today, will we get a masterpiece or a hilarious mistake-piece? Buckle up and find out!

On the menu:

• 💡 Exploring the world of constraints - the marketing superstar that everyone's talking about.

• 🎨 Painfully average poetry with ChatGPT - let's hope for Shakespearean brilliance, but settle for AI mediocrity.

With back-and-forth iteration, jokes, poems, and playful wordplay, you might question my sanity... and my career choices.

But hey, let's try to make you laugh anyway. Ready, set, go!

I delight at the skinny one-liners, insults and ironies that somehow squeeze into the tiny boxes of 2006 …a time when Twitter was just taking its baby steps.

Despite the 280-character constraint, Twitter has become a platform for personal expression and business communication. And here I am, struggling to piece two words together even with a whole paragraph at my disposal.

Maybe there's a secret society of Twitter experts, and my invitation got lost in the spam folder.

But back to the topic at hand, constraints do help extract our brilliance making us the masters of crispness🎓 and save us from our own (and specially my own) rambling tendencies.

Constraints are on every road you and I have walked - Space, time, resources, environment, money, technical, regulatory, material, legal, ethical, capacity, geographical, design, market, safety, aesthetic, security, availability and oh, so many more.

The Bloody Constraint guy is a marketing genius as well; It has managed to enter into every creative textbook, whispered about by inventors, business moguls, and self-help gurus alike. It’s name is scribbled in the margins of every Steve Jobs and Oprah Winfrey quote.

Bravo, well-played Constraint Sir?

But hold on a moment! Before we delve into the depths of why you and I should care about constraints when working with ChatGPT, let me share an exclusive secret offer for today. Prepare to be amazed!

Here it is……

But why in the world are constraints so important anyway? Can ChatGPT handle them? And if so, how in the AI realm can we make it work. Let’s find out.

Who says constraints can't be fun? Certainly not ChatGPT! Despite its limitations, this AI-powered tool can produce unexpected and exciting results when given the right structure and constraints.

I've experimented with various techniques to get the best out of ChatGPT, from condensing complex ideas into catchy taglines to creating rhyming summaries for the videos of this newsletter. Through a constant back-and-forth with ChatGPT, I've found that the right balance of limitation and freedom can unlock its full potential as a tool for generating impactful and innovative content.

For instance, when I challenged ChatGPT to craft a captivating tagline for a revolutionary fitness app, it surprised me with "Unleash your inner champion, one rep at a time!"

The key is to remember that constraints are not meant to stifle creativity, but rather to guide it in a specific direction. By mixing and matching different types of constraints, such as forced connections and random word prompts, you can unlock endless possibilities for generating new and exciting ideas.

Let’s look at a few additional constraints

Here are a few more examples of constraints that I have tried out:

There are many more constraints I have tried and don’t have space to share details (more to come on this). Each and every constraint, we encounter in our everyday life can be utilized to create prompts. Space, time, resources, environment, money, technical, regulatory, material, legal, ethical, capacity, geographical, design, market, safety, aesthetic, security constraints can be added as part of prompts to generate interesting responses

You can also ask ChatGPT to help you create a prompt for each of the constraint above and an example situation as well where that constraint could be used. Here is a specific prompt that can be used-

Can you provide me with a prompt for utilizing X constraint..." or "I'd like a creative suggestion for...using X constraint...." followed by the specific topic or context you're interested in.

While each type of constraint can help generate new and interesting ideas, combining different types can lead to even more unexpected and exciting results.

For example, I've experimented with the forced connections constraint and a random word constraint. Imagine linking "exercise" with "creativity boosters." This led to the concept of "active brainstorming," where individuals engage in physical activity while generating ideas to stimulate their creativity and enhance problem-solving abilities.

I want to provide you with a mental model that will help you to get the most out of tools like ChatGPT, rather than a list of a hundred specific prompts. By understanding this mental model, you can start to create prompts on your own using your own creative powers, and tap into endless creative possibilities.

In upcoming episode……, We mix n match constraints and explore the related concept of using frameworks to get the best out of ChatGPT. Grab a seat, buckle up tight, Expect some humor, but skepticism's alright. Till next time, stay safe and snide.