Hey Warrior,

We have a guest spotlight in store for you today.

My new good friend Dan is the founder of PromptHub and The Prompt Engineering Substack. Dan spends hours every week keeping up with the latest research around prompt engineering and AI.

I’m excited to have Dan contribute to The Prompt Warrior with today’s post about emotional prompting and for potentially more posts in the future.

Hi, I’m Dan Cleary from PromptHub, and today I’m thrilled to share some information about how emotional language can help you get better outputs from LLMs. Thanks again to Moritz for inviting me to share and engage with this amazing community!

With any of the content I create, I keep 2 things in mind:

1. Get to the point

2. Make it easy to act upon

Without further delay, let’s jump into 11 emotional prompts you can use to get better outputs.

Why do emotional prompts work?

When using generative AI tools like ChatGPT, a large language model (LLM) is working underneath the hood to generate text and images. These models have been trained on a vast corpus of data from the internet. Up until 2023, the content on the internet was almost entirely written by humans. Thus, LLMs are trained on human behavior, our tendencies, tones, etc. In this way, LLMs hold up a mirror to ourselves.

This is why things like emotional pleas and reasoning phrases can improve your prompts. 

Imagine that if your partner said “Please take out the trash now or else you’re sleeping on the couch tonight” instead of “Please take out the trash”. Which do you think would prompt you to take action faster and do a better job? The same thing occurs when chatting with LLMs.

So let’s jump into a few examples, spanning multiple use cases, that you can start using right away.

Emotional Prompt 1

Pushing the model to do self-evaluation is one of the best ways to ensure it thinks through its thought process. Additionally, this gives you a better idea of how factual the information is. Chances are if the model isn’t confident, neither should you be.

Emotional Prompt 2

Nothing like some good old-fashioned guilt to make LLMs pay attention! This one is by far one of my favorites out of the group, and the one I actually use most often when using ChatGPT.

Emotional Prompt 3

Prompting the model to guess its solution can help it think more thoroughly.

Emotional Prompt 4

Having the model “Double-check” its thinking allows for deeper reasoning. This usually leads to more thoughtful and accurate responses. 

Emotional Prompt 5

An additional improvement would be to ask the model to include any thoughts between thought tags (<thought> thoughts </thought>). Doing this gives the model additional room to think, and it helps you distinguish and segregate parts of the output. 

Emotional Prompt 6

This is a combination of a few of the other emotional prompts. The research shows that stacking emotional prompts like this didn’t lead to much better gains. That being said, I think it is worth testing based on your use case. 

Emotional Prompt 7

It’s interesting seeing how much LLMs hold up a mirror to us as humans. 

Emotional Prompt 8

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but for prompt engineering.

Emotional Prompt 9, 10, and 11

These three prompts all relate to our innate nature to strive to do better and perform at a high-level. I like to use these for tasks that have longer outputs, like generating content, because I find it helps keep the model in line and focused through the entire task.

Wrapping up

Again, thanks to Moritz for letting me share some info with you today. I’ve always admired his newsletter and content from afar, so this feels good. I hope these tips help you get better outputs!

For similar content, feel free to check out our blog at PromptHub and our weekly Substack.

Thanks for reading!

If you enjoyed this email, consider forwarding this newsletter to a friend or colleague.

See you in the next one!

Moritz

P.S. Whenever you’re ready, here are two ways I can help you:

1. Get your product in front of 20,000+ solopreneurs, business owners and professionals. Sponsor this newsletter here.

2. Do you need help with an AI-related problem you’re facing? Grab some time with me here for an AI consulting session.