GIGO is bad

How to avoid "Garbage In Garbage Out" with AI

Photo by Kevin Butz on Unsplash

Back in the late 1900’s, when I was in high school, I learned Basic Programming.

It was one of the first computer languages, and it had One Big Rule…don’t program garbage.

If you did, you’d get garbage results.

We called it GIGO - Garbage In, Garbage Out - and we tried to avoid it at all costs.

That rule is back with AI prompting.

If you write a garbage prompt, you’ll get garbage results.

Many of us tried AI when it was new, and we asked it to “write me an article about functional medicine (or whatever your specialty is)”. When it came back with a craptacular piece of content, we moved on with our lives and forgot about AI.

But, dear reader, we didn’t give it enough to work with.

If you had asked AI the right way - with a good prompt - it would have given you something to be proud of publishing.

Try it right now.

Head over to ChatGPT and give it this prompt:

Write a concise and informative article that explores the principles and practices of functional medicine, including its approach to understanding the root causes of chronic diseases, the role of lifestyle factors and environmental toxins in disease development, and the importance of personalized and integrative healthcare. Please highlight the key differences between functional medicine and conventional medicine, and provide examples of successful treatment outcomes achieved through functional medicine approaches.

See the difference?

Asking vague questions gives you vague answers, but asking clear, targeted questions - especially with AI - gives you real answers that you can rewrite or publish as is.

Learning how to prompt, or “Ask AI the Right Way”, is a skill. It’s one of the best skills you can learn in 2025, as AI continues to grow. It’s not going away, and it isn’t taking your job…but someone with AI will take your job if you aren’t proficient with it.

So here’s what I recommend…subscribe to this newsletter and I’ll continue to share prompting tips and techniques with you. You can learn the basics in an afternoon, and then we can dig into Bigger and Better Prompts.

Talk to you then!