Are your interactions with AI giving you the results you want? Do you feel like you’re really getting the increased efficiency and productivity that Harvard has been telling you about?

Having covered the basics of effective prompting with Scope, Context, and Goals, the next step is looking at how you can use Precision and Accuracy to allow you to improve your results.

The question isn’t whether you’re “good” at AI. The question is whether you’re skilled enough at asking the right questions to leverage your expertise to close the gap between the AI’s initial attempts and the quality you desire for your goal.

Whether you’re trying to create a logo, slogan, or a full product design document, creating content with AI isn’t often a one and done activity. It’s usually a back and forth content conversation between the creator and the machine. An attempt to get to a point of satisfaction through synthesis where the creator now acts more like an editor – setting up initial conditions, then giving feedback and asking for specific revisions until they get something that satisfies their goals.

When prompting AI, precision involves being clear, concrete, and providing the details that will give you the results you need.

By increasing your precision you increase the ability of the AI to match your original creative intent. In some cases that may be as simple as asking the AI to match a predetermined style benchmark. I’ll often use previous editions of this newsletter as a style target, specifically asking it to match my “style and tone” in output.

But the AI can use any material to help to define its goal. Whatever source you provide, the key is having enough familiarity to guide it toward parts that will give you what you want.

The main question for the creator is whether they can effectively judge the AI’s attempts and know how to iteratively steer things toward alignment — how closely the AI’s output matches the intent of the prompts and guidelines you provide. Defining expectations upfront will boost results by reducing iterations needed.

It helps if your goal is something that you’ve previously done manually or, at the very least, having developed a more refined sense of the specifics you’re aiming for.

When improving precision, detail is crucial. Understanding exactly what and how you want something delivered will lead to better results and skill growth. If you have only a vague idea of what you’re looking to get, ask the AI to analyze and explain the style of some example texts. This can give you a better sense of what elements to emulate or avoid.

If we start out by assuming that AI can’t deliver the goods, it’s often a reflection of our own fuzzy creative vision. But using precision to generate crystal-clear prompts is a recipe for shattering limits into a million pieces.

Embracing your inner AI whisperer reveals new possibilities for human-computer collaboration. Know your own intentions, communicate them clearly, and possibilities will surface that you never saw coming. By bringing precision to the party you’ll unlock achievements beyond your expectations.