The Strategic Use of Temperature

There is no temperature control in the ChatGPT app - it is a parameter in the API and nowhere in the interface, so ignore any instruction telling you to turn it down. Steer with the wording instead: for factual work, say explicitly that nothing outside the source may be added and that absent information must be reported as absent; for creative work, ask for volume and for deliberately unexpected directions. When you need both, ask for them as two numbered tasks in one message so the factual half is written before the inventive half begins.

• No temperature slider in the app - it is an API setting.
• For factual: ban anything not in the source, explicitly.
• For creative: ask for volume and for unexpected angles.
• Need both? Two numbered tasks, factual one first.
• Low-temperature wording reduces invention, never removes it.

**Goal: a precise, factual summary of a news article.**

There is no temperature setting in this app, so the precision has to come from the instruction. This is what that looks like.

## TASK

Summarise the five key facts of the article below as a numbered list.

## CONSTRAINTS - these are the whole point

1. **Only what is in the text.** No background, no context, no explanation of why something happened unless the article says why. If you know something relevant that the article does not contain, leave it out.
2. **No interpretation.** Do not tell me what the development means, who it favours, or what is likely to follow. A fact is what the article states; everything else is yours and I do not want it.
3. **Plain language.** No vivid verbs, no framing adjectives. "The minister said X" rather than "the minister insisted X".
4. **Names, numbers, dates and quotes exactly as written.** No rounding, no converting between lakh, crore and million, no paraphrasing a quote.
5. **Attribute every claim as the article attributes it.** If the article says "officials said", your line says "officials said". Do not promote a reported claim into a stated fact.
6. **If there are fewer than five distinct facts, give me fewer** and say so. Do not pad the list by splitting one fact into two or by adding something you know.

## AFTER THE LIST

One short section, "What I left out": anything in the article you judged to be opinion, analysis or editorial framing rather than fact. That tells me where the line fell, and whether I agree with where you drew it.

## ARTICLE

[Paste the article text here]

**Goal: brainstorm creative names for a new food delivery service in Hyderabad.**

There is no creativity slider in this app, so the looseness has to be asked for. This is how.

Act as a creative branding expert. The product: a food delivery app in Hyderabad whose single promise is speed - faster than anything else in the city.

## WHAT I WANT

20 unconventional, catchy names. Be genuinely adventurous. Play with words, blend English with Telugu, Hyderabadi Urdu or Hindi, invent compounds, use sounds. I would rather have five names I reject as too strange than twenty I forget immediately.

## HOW TO BE ACTUALLY INVENTIVE RATHER THAN NOMINALLY SO

Spread the 20 across these approaches, roughly four each - this is what stops a "be creative" instruction returning twenty safe synonyms for fast:

1. **Speed by implication** - something that is fast without the word fast in it.
2. **Telugu, Urdu or Hindi words** used straight, with the meaning and pronunciation given.
3. **Invented words** - coinages, portmanteaus, sounds that mean nothing and feel right.
4. **Deliberately wrong-footed** - names that have nothing obvious to do with food or speed and work anyway.
5. **Hyderabad-specific** - something only this city would name a company.

## BANNED

Any name containing: fast, quick, rapid, swift, zoom, dash, flash, speed, express, instant, blitz, turbo, rocket, flash, now, bite, eats, food. Those are the twenty names a safe answer produces and they are all taken.

## THEN

1. **The three strangest**, and for each the argument for it. A name that needs an argument is often the one worth having.
2. **The three you would actually ship**, which should not be the same three.
3. **What to check.** For your top five, say plainly what you cannot verify - trademark status, domain availability, whether the word means something unfortunate in a language you are reaching into. Do not guess at any of it. Inventiveness is fine here; confident invention about facts is not.

**Goal: both a factual summary and a creative interpretation of a poem.**

This is the example where the chapter's original framing is most misleading, so read this first: you cannot set temperature in this app and you cannot change it mid-conversation. What you can do is ask for two tasks in one message, with different instructions for each - which produces the same contrast without pretending there is a dial.

Analyse "The Tyger" by William Blake. Two tasks, in this order.

## TASK 1 - LITERAL

One clear paragraph describing what the poem says on its surface. Who is speaking, what they are looking at, what they ask. Quote the poem's own words where it helps.

Constraints for this task only:
- No symbolism, no interpretation, no "represents" or "stands for".
- No biography of Blake and nothing about *Songs of Experience* or "The Lamb".
- Plain description. If a reader who had never heard of Blake could not verify it against the text in front of them, it does not belong in Task 1.

## TASK 2 - INTERPRETIVE

Three genuinely different readings of what the Tyger might signify. Be imaginative and go somewhere unexpected.

For this task:
- Make the three readings actually incompatible with each other, not three angles on the same reading. If all three come back as versions of "the tiger is divine power", the task has failed.
- Range widely: theological, political, psychological, aesthetic, or something I have not thought of. The industrial revolution reading and the problem-of-evil reading are the standard two - include them if you like, but at least one of the three should be strange.
- Anchor each in specific lines, however far you take it. Imaginative is not the same as unmoored.
- For each, name what it cannot explain. Every reading of this poem leaves something unaccounted for, and which lines resist a reading is the most interesting thing about it.

## THEN

One short note on where the boundary between the two tasks was hard to hold. "Fearful symmetry" is not a neutral description of a tiger, so a genuinely literal summary of this poem may not be possible. If you had to interpret in order to describe, say which line forced it - that is the real lesson of this exercise, and more useful than either task on its own.