Why you should stop roleplaying with ChatGPT

Act as a responsible ChatGPT user, and don’t ask for more than it can do.

This article was co-authored with Annelie Tinworth, Lead UX Content Designer at Volvo Cars, localisation legend, and word nerd extraordinaire.

Whenever I see a LinkedIn post or article about ChatGPT best practices, there’s consistently one tip that’s always listed: roleplay with it. Tell it who to act as.

I’m sure you’ve seen prompts beginning with some combination of the following recommendations:

• Act as a writer…
• Act as a data analyst…
• Act as a content designer with 20 years of experience…

Now, since ChatGPT is a tool that generates output by predicting language based on the combination of words in your input, I’ve been pretty dubious about this advice. Surely unless you’re telling it to “Act as a natural language processing chatbot driven by generative AI,” you’re asking it to do something it’s not designed for.

That’s where I think it can be pretty dangerous to recommend roleplaying because it gives a false impression that this tool can do more than it actually can — and indeed, that it can replace skill sets such as writing and data analysis, which is absolutely not the case.