The secret to using generative AI effectively

Do you think generative AI (genAI) sucks? I did. The hype around everything genAI has been over the top and ridiculous for a while now. Especially at the start, most of the tools were flashy, but quickly fell apart if you tried to use them for any serious work purposes.

When ChatGPT started really growing in early 2023, I turned against it hard. It wasn’t just a potentially interesting research product. It was a bad concept getting shoved into everything.

Corporate layoffs driven by executives who loved the idea of replacing people with unreliable robots hurt a lot of workers. They hurt a lot of businesses, too. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now all agree: genAI, in its original incarnation, just wasn’t working.

At the end of 2023, I wrote about Microsoft’s then-new Copilot AI chatbot and summed it up as “a storyteller — a chaotic creative engine that’s been pressed into service as a buttoned-up virtual assistant, [with] the seams always showing.”

You’d probably use it wrong, as I noted at the time. Even if you used it right, it wasn’t all that great. It felt like using a smarter autocomplete.

Much has changed. At this point in 2025, gen AI tools can actually be useful — but only if you use them right. And after much experimentation and contemplation, I think I’ve found the secret.

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The power of your internal dialogue

So here it is: To get the best possible results from genAI, you must externalize your internal dialogue. Plain and simple, AI models work best when you give them more information and context.

It’s a shift from the way we’re accustomed to thinking about these sorts of interactions, but it isn’t without precedent. When Google itself first launched, people often wanted to type questions at it — to spell out long, winding sentences. That wasn’t how to use the search engine most effectively, though. Google search queries needed to be stripped to the minimum number of words.

GenAI is exactly the opposite. You need to give the AI as much detail as possible. If you start a new chat and type a single-sentence question, you’re not going to get a very deep or interesting response.

To put it simply: You shouldn’t be prompting genAI like it’s still 2023. You aren’t performing a web search. You aren’t asking a question.

Instead, you need to be thinking out loud. You need to iterate with a bit of back and forth. You need to provide a lot of detail, see what the system tells you — then pick out something that is interesting to you, drill down on that, and keep going.

You are co-discovering things, in a sense. GenAI is best thought of as a brainstorming partner. Did it miss something? Tell it — maybe you’re missing something and it can surface it for you. The more you do this, the better the responses will get.

It’s actually the easiest thing in the world. But it’s also one of the hardest mental shifts to make.

Let’s take a simple example: You’re trying to remember a word, and it’s on the tip of your tongue. You can’t quite remember it, but you can vaguely describe it. If you were using Google to find the word, you’d have to really think about how to craft the perfect search term.

In that same scenario, you could rely on AI with a somewhat rambling, conversational prompt like this:

“What’s the word for a soft kind of feeling you get — it’s warm, but a little cold. It’s sad, but that’s not quite right. You miss something, but you’re happy you miss it. It’s not melancholy, that’s wrong, that’s too sad. I don’t know. It reminds me of walking home from school on a sunny fall afternoon. The sun is setting and you know it will be winter soon, and you miss summer, and you know it’s over, but you’re happy it happened.”

And the genAI might respond: wistful. That’s your answer. More likely, the tool will return a list of possible words. It might not magically know you meant wistful right away — but you will know the moment you see the word within its suggestions.

This is admittedly an overwrought example. A shorter description of the word — “it’s kind of like this, and it’s kind of like that” — would also likely do the trick.

Ramble on

The best way to sum up this strategy is simple: You need to ramble.

Try this, as an experiment: Open up the ChatGPT app on your Android or iOS phone and tap the microphone button at the right side of the chat box. Make sure you’re using the microphone button and not the voice chat mode button, which does not let you do this properly.

(Amusingly enough, the ChatGPT Windows app doesn’t support this style of voice input, and Microsoft’s Copilot app doesn’t, either. This shows that the companies building this type of product don’t really understand how it’s best used. If you want to ramble with your voice, you’ll need to use your phone — or ramble by typing on your keyboard.)

After you tap the microphone button, ramble at your phone in a stream-of-consciousness style. Let’s say you want TV show recommendations. Ramble about the shows you like, what you think of them, what parts you like. Ramble about other things you like that might be relevant — or that might not seem relevant! Think out loud. Seriously — talk for a full minute or two. When you’re done, tap the microphone button once more. Your rambling will now be text in the box. Your “ums” and speech quirks will be in there, forming extra context about the way you were thinking. Do not bother reading it — if there are typos, the AI will figure it out. Click send. See what happens.

Just be prepared for the fact that ChatGPT (or other tools) won’t give you a single streamlined answer. It will riff off what you said and give you something to think about. You can then seize on what you think is interesting — when you read the response, you will be drawn to certain things. Drill down, ask questions, share your thoughts. Keep using the voice input if it helps. It’s convenient and helps you really get into a stream-of-consciousness rambling state.

Did the response you got fail to deliver what you needed? Tell it. Say you were disappointed because you were expecting something else. Say you’ve already watched all those shows and you didn’t like them. That is extra context. Keep drilling down.

You don’t have to use voice input, necessarily. But, if you’re typing, you need to type like you’re talking to yourself — with an inner dialogue, stream-of-consciousness style, as if you were speaking out loud. If you say something that isn’t quite right, don’t hit backspace. Keep going. Say: “That wasn’t quite right — I actually meant something more like this other thing.”

The beauty of back-and-forth

Let’s say you want to use genAI to brainstorm the perfect marketing tagline for a campaign. You’d start by rambling about your project, or maybe just speaking a shorter prompt. Ask for a bunch of rough ideas so you can start contemplating and take it from there.

But then, critically, you keep going. You say you like a few ideas in particular and want to go more in that direction. You get some more possibilities back. You keep going, on and on — “Well, I like the third one, but I think it needs more of [something], and the sixth one is all right but [something else].” Keep talking, postulating, refining, following paths of concepts to something that feels more right to you.

If the tool doesn’t seem to be on the right wavelength, don’t get frustrated and back out. Tell it: “No, you don’t understand. This is for a major clothing company. I need it to sound professional but also catch people’s eyes. That’s why your suggestions are all too much.”

In a similar way to how the long stream-of-consciousness ramble lays a lot of context to push genAI in a useful direction this back-and-forth lays a lot of context as groundwork. Your entire conversation until that point forms the scaffolding of the conversation and affects the future responses in the thread. As you keep adding onto and continuing the conversation, you can make it more attuned to what you’re looking for.

Crucially, genAI is not making decisions. You are making all the decisions.  You are exercising the taste. You can push it in this or that direction to get ideas. If it lands on something you disagree with, you can push back: “No, that’s not right at all. We really got off track. How about…?”

Is this silly? Well, brainstorming doesn’t normally mean sitting in an empty room meditating while staring at paint drying. It often means searching Google, seeing what other people say, poking around for inspiration. This can be similar — but faster.

Maybe you still use Google for brainstorming sometimes — or go for a walk and be alone with your thoughts! That’s fine, too. GenAI is meant to be another tool in your toolbox. It isn’t meant to be the end-all answer.

The bigger AI picture

To be clear: I’m not here to sell you on the idea of embracing genAI. I’m here to tell you that companies peddling these tools right now are selling you the wrong thing. The way they talk about the technology is not how you should use it. It’s no wonder so many smart people are bouncing off it and being rightfully critical of what we’re being sold.

GenAI should not be a replacement for thinking. More than anything, it is a tool for exploring concepts and the connections between them. You can use it to write a better email. You can use it to put together a marketing plan. It will do things you don’t expect, and that’s the point.

Yes, it might hallucinate and make things up. (That’s why you need to keep your brain engaged.) You might want to just opt out. You might decided to keep plugging away looking for answers. Just remember: If you’re using genAI, try to use it to be more human, not less. That will help you write better emails — and accomplish much more beyond that.

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