The inspiration for this post comes from an ’80s song by singer and musician Joe Jackson. The entire title is: You Can’t Get What You Want (‘Til You Know What You Want). That’s quite a title in terms of word count, but the song wouldn’t be the same without that second part.
Yesterday I touched briefly on working on this WordPress and how frustrating it was having no prior knowledge or experience. I even added a cartoon-type image of me and my figurative headache.
What does that image, using AI, and the title of this post have in common?
When you’re using AI, you have to know what you want to get what you want.
At first I just asked for an abstract image of a headache. I got back a picture that looked like a mannequin head with red blotches and lightning bolts coming from it. Yikes! Too violent for what I wanted, I told Chat GPT. Make something humorous.
The response to that was a banana slipping on a banana peel. What? That was both cartoonish and not conveying what I wanted. Add me, I instructed, figuring this would do the trick. The next thing I knew the image was depicting me as a bear wearing a dress and a nightcap waving a dough roller at the banana.
Now I thought I was going to get a literal headache. Then I remembered the same principles I use for work with AI needed to be applied for my WordPress. There is no magic difference from one platform to another. You have to be specific or you’re going to spend a lot of time making photo edit requests.
I told it to use a realistic but artistic image as though I was a page in a graphic novel. I wanted to be sitting at a desk, my laptop in front of me, clearly frustrated by what I was doing. I wanted to be surrounded by all the things you would expect to find near a writer-books, paper, and a steaming cup of coffee or tea. And since I love cats and have cats of my own, add a cat dozing away near me.
The result is the picture you saw in that previous post, exactly what I wanted. Because I gave AI enough information to make it that way. I was detailed and concise. I thought my request through before I made it. I added my extras such as a cup of coffee and a cat because I wanted to ensure they were there.
That’s the secret, which really isn’t a secret. It can just be difficult to pull everything together and present it to get the results you want. Once I remembered that song, and treated this as it work project, everything fell into place.
I got what I wanted, because I knew what I wanted.
Writing With Results 
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