Lead with Emotional Intelligence before you input your AI prompts.

Which comes first, AI or EI?

Do you start your writing project with AI, and then tweak the outputs to make the copy more emotionally intelligent?

That’s how most people do this. And it’s how I do it myself, some of the time.

Start with a tool like ChatGPT to do the heavy lifting. Use it to do research for a new page, the outline, and a first draft. Once that’s done, you can add layers of more emotionally engaging copy to make the whole thing more appealing and effective.

But… it doesn’t have to be that way.

You can actually lead with emotional intelligence.

Let me give you an example.

Let’s say I want to write a short blog post about saving for retirement. I know this can be an emotionally charged topic, with people worried about not having enough money to get by, and so on.

Just by recognizing that people might feel anxious about retirement is demonstrating that I’m already bringing some emotional intelligence to the table. I’m being empathetic. I’m putting myself in the shoes of my audience. I’m recognizing their concerns and anxiety.

I can now enrich my prompts with some of that emotion.

Here’s an example I worked on with GPT-4.

The Prompt:

Create a short blog post that empathizes with the anxiety of saving for retirement and offers reassuring advice.

Empathizes… anxiety… reassuring. I’ve simply loaded the prompt with some emotional terms.

Now let’s look at the first two paragraphs of the output GPT-4 generated.

GPT-4 Output:

Saving for retirement can often feel like a daunting and anxiety-ridden task. Many of us worry whether we’re saving enough, if we’re investing wisely, or if we’ll be able to maintain our lifestyle in our golden years. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the thought of retirement savings, you’re not alone.

First and foremost, it’s important to recognize that these feelings are normal. Planning for decades into the future is inherently uncertain, and it’s okay to feel anxious about it. The key is to channel this anxiety into constructive action.

As you can see, it didn’t take much for GPT-4 to understand what I was looking for. The output isn’t perfect, and I’d definitely do some editing. But it’s a reasonable start, and demonstrates a degree of emotional intelligence.

Does this mean I can rely on AI tools to create emotionally intelligent copy?

No. But it does mean you can influence the output by adding emotional terms in the prompt itself.

Then come the edits…

One thing I might want to do in a case like this is include a story or example in the opening paragraphs. I might feature the experiences and emotions of a real person who is feeling anxious about her retirement planning.

If I opened with two paragraphs on the real-life example, the opening paragraphs written by GPT-4 would be bumped to numbers three and four.

And I’d definitely change the phrase “anxiety-ridden task” in that first paragraph. Feels clunky to me.

Long story short… while you’ll always need to edit AI outputs to make your copy more emotionally engaging, you can help yourself by including emotional words and phrases in the prompts themselves.

If you want to learn more about adding a higher level of emotional intelligence to writing that is generated by AI, be sure to find out about my course, Futureproof Copywriting.