The AI Alchemist's Transmutation Engine
Medieval alchemists dreamed of turning lead into gold. GPT's 'T' stands for Transformer—and it delivers. Here's how to use it.
"The changing of bodies into light, and light into bodies, is very conformable to the course of Nature, which seems delighted with transmutations."
— Sir Isaac Newton
GPT: Three letters that have turned the world upside down. The GPT acronym stands for "generative pre-trained transformers"—the breakthrough technology developed by the machine learning experts at OpenAI. In my region of the San Francisco Bay Area, everyone is talking about generative AI as the technology that will transform and revitalize the tech industry. However, much of the hype around the "generative" component of GPT has obscured the even greater breakthrough embodied by the "T."
The transformative power of AI lies less in its ability to spit out generic, rambling essays on any topic, and more in its capacity for transforming lower-value inputs into higher-value outputs. In medieval times, alchemists sought to transform "base" metals into precious gold through the mythical philosopher's stone. Though the alchemists never achieved their goal, advanced AI capabilities bring us closer to making their metaphorical vision a reality. With the right prompts, you can input messy, unstructured scribblings and output polished writing.
The Basic Transformation Operations
After you highlight a block of text and select "AskAI" in tools like Notion, you are presented with a list of prompts or commands:
Improve Writing
Simplify Language
Change Tone
Summarize
Make Shorter/Longer
Translate
Find Action Items
Continue writing...
These preset prompts represent a sampling of the fundamental "transformation operations" that provide the most value for the most people. However, these basic prompts only scratch the surface of what's possible once you master the true power of GPTs to transform base inputs into precious metals.
Let's begin with my personal favorite—the workhorse of AI-assisted writing—Improve writing.
Improve Writing / Fix Spelling & Grammar
Improve writing restructures sentences, fixes spelling and grammar, clarifies meaning, and enhances flow, whereas its sister prompt, Fix spelling & grammar, makes fewer sweeping changes to your word choice, only correcting what is grammatically incorrect.
Both of these prompts save time when correcting messy transcripts or hasty rough drafts. But take care to check the outputs against the originals to make sure that the "improvements" align with the speaker's intent.
With Improve writing, I usually opt to "insert below," while retaining the original as a reference. When running Fix spelling & grammar, I usually just replace the old, typo-ridden sentence with the new one because of its more cautious approach.
Simplify Language
The Simplify language prompt is useful when you need help making your writing less wordy and pretentious. It can also take a jargon-filled block of text and make it more clear to a layperson.
Summarize
The Summarize prompt can help you create an overview of a page or article in seconds. The longer the "source," the more details it will condense. Summary outputs are capped at a certain point, so if you want a more detailed summary, it's better to summarize in smaller chunks, and then combine the summaries together.
The Transformation Operation Station
For all of the above prompts, it's easy enough to reverse engineer the prompts underlying Notion's AI interface within a chat console like ChatGPT or Claude. In most cases, you can just use the words of the operation, followed by a colon and the source material in quotes:
Improve the writing of this passage: ""
Summarize this: ""
Explain this: ""
These short commands carry enough of an "aura of meaning" to deliver the desired output. However, you can increase the value of your transformation operations by adding specific context and formatting requirements.
Advanced Transformation Operations
Beyond preset prompts, we can explore a variety of other transformation operations that come in handy in the writing process:
Paraphrase — Condenses and rewrites external material while preserving meaning. Useful for distilling research; quoting someone concisely.
Reorganization — Structures disorganized content into outlines with logical flow. Useful for bringing order to chaotic rough drafts and scattered notes, identifying key themes and narrative arc.
Proceduralization — Transforms process descriptions into structured, step-by-step instructions. Useful for developing standard operating procedures, troubleshooting guides, and onboarding processes.
Personification/Imitation — Mimics a specific writer's voice and style. Useful for ghostwriting or maintaining brand voice.
Transition — Smooths connections between ideas in a text. Useful for bridging paragraphs, connecting concepts, establishing flow.
Combination — Merges separate content together by removing redundancy. Useful for integrating drafts, collapsing sections, synthesizing sources.
This broad overview of transformation operations only begins to catalog the numerous ways you can "reprogram" text with simple, transformative prompts. Indeed, if you consider the nature of natural language programming, you will see that every word functions as an operator on every other word—altering their weight, their texture, and their meaning.
The Alchemist's Journey
Though best known for his scientific achievements and the invention of calculus, Isaac Newton also dabbled in alchemy. But while Newton failed to find the mystical philosopher's stone, he made great strides in chemistry and physics in the process. In a similar vein, failed attempts at creative prompting can help you to refine your approach. Through trial and error—toil and transformation—AI brings you closer to realizing the ancient alchemical dream of turning simple inputs into rich, expressive content.
This post is adapted from "Commanding the Page" (2023).