Show It an Example

Why “make it distinctive” gets you the least distinctive thing there is, and what to paste instead.

You wanted it to write something with a particular feel. A tagline, a bio, an email in the right tone, a name that sounds like you and not like everyone. So you were careful about it. You asked for punchy. Modern. Distinctive. You told it to steer well clear of the corporate stuff.

And it came back polished and completely generic. The kind of line you have read a hundred times on a hundred websites. You asked for distinctive and got the opposite, so you added more words, and got a longer version of the same thing.

The words were the problem. Being more specific in adjectives is not being more specific. “Distinctive” is not a target, it is a direction, and there is an enormous crowd of distinctive-ish things it could point at. Told to head in that direction, the machine has to decide what you mean, and it often lands somewhere familiar in that crowd: polished, broadly compatible with the word you gave it. That is where generic comes from. You named a direction without showing it where along that direction you wanted to go.

I watched this happen. I asked for five taglines for a small bookshop, and said make them charming, memorable and distinctive. It gave me the flowery, template version, the exact voice you would guess: “trade the noise of the world for the turn of a page.” Asked to be distinctive, it produced the least distinctive thing on offer.

Paste an example, and say match this

So stop describing the style, and show it one.

Find something that already has the feel you want. A tagline you wish you had written, a paragraph whose voice you would happily borrow, an email whose tone you admire (keep out anything you would not want to put into the tool you are using). One is enough to start, and a few can work better. Paste it in and say: match this. That is the whole move, and it is shorter than the paragraph of adjectives you were about to write.

When I dropped the adjectives and instead pasted three taglines I liked, plain and dry and lower case, and said only match these, it answered in the same plain voice. Not by repeating the three I gave it, but with new ones in the same plain, lower-case voice: “books you’ll actually read.” “fewer books, better ones.” “just books, really.” Same machine, same bookshop. What I had taken away was the adjectives; what I had added was something to aim at.

The example does not have to be from the same world. A tagline you like from a coffee brand can teach it the voice for your bookshop. Think of it as the target to aim at, and you can still keep, edit or throw out whatever comes back.

Why an example beats a paragraph

An example is a thing it can see and follow. An adjective is only a word, and a word covers everything the word could mean. “Warm” spans a birthday card and a hostage negotiation. Show it one line that is warm in the way you mean, and suddenly “warm” has an address.

That is the difference between pointing at a target and naming a direction. It can hit a target you show it. Give it only a direction and it often lands somewhere familiar.

An example is a target it can see and match. An adjective is only a direction, and it fills a direction with the ordinary. Show it the thing; do not describe the thing.

That is also why this holds up as the tools change. It is not a trick tied to today’s model. However good the next one is, it cannot see the specific thing in your head, and a description will rarely carry it across as cleanly as one real example. The surest way to hand over your specific thing is to show it an example of it.

Where it catches you out

It will follow your example closely, and that includes a bad one. Grab the first thing to hand because it was convenient, and you will get a clean, confident version of something you did not actually want, which is harder to spot than an obviously generic miss.

So before you paste it, read the example back and ask whether it is really the thing you want, not just the thing you found. The move carries your taste across to the machine. It does not give you taste, and it will follow a lazy choice as readily as a good one. When the thing you are trying to get right is bigger than a tagline, the same rule holds: a better model still needs to know what your version of good looks like. I wrote about why the setup you give a model beats the model itself for anyone whose version of this has moved past writing taglines.