Well, if ever there was a day that a blog series about “prompt cartography” should be celebrating then today is that day!
National Speak in Complete Sentences Day is an annual observance dedicated to challenging people to use full thoughts, proper subjects, and predicates in all conversations. It encourages clear, thoughtful communication while explicitly avoiding acronyms and sentence fragments.
As Ian and I have been experimenting making these daily maps one aspect has become abundantly clear – you get what you ask for. And if you don’t explicitly ask for something then you’ll get whatever the AI and LLMs decide you’re going to get, and it could be pretty much anything of any quality. Of course, if you’re light on inspiration and don’t particularly care what you get then letting the AI come up with its own inspirations can be somewhat freeing, but being explicit, and using proper grammar often yields far better outcomes. Prompts are important. Learning how to express yourself and your requirements is important. If anything, being able to construct a useful prompt is harking back to the days when you had to write out detail map specs before you began the project so you didn’t end up making costly mistakes (in time and materials).
Finally, then, we can return to a time when speaking in full sentences, and making sense translates your thoughts into meaning for the AI to act upon. That said, how on earth do you make a map to celebrate today? No idea – I let the AI make it up. Actually, I tried two AI agents just to see if they were in agreement.
First, the ChatGPT result…
And here’s the Nano Banana 2 result…
On the face of it these two maps are stylistically very different. But what’s interesting to me is that totally different AI agents both independently chose a route map. They both set the route through a mountain landscape. And I didn’t request it but the successful destination was depicted by a magnificent turreted castle on both maps. Why??? I don’t think I’ve ever used this visual metaphor but it’s getting its cues from somewhere.
Regardless, both maps do very much support the need for clarity. So – make clear your prompts!
Original Prompt (ChatGPT and Nano Banana 2)
For National Speak in Complete Sentences Day can you make a map-like image that in some way reflects the need to give AI full, well thought-through sentences to direct the LLM to deliver something that matches the human’s intent.