How to prompt ChatGPT to write like a human

Let’s clone Minsuk Kang.

You are a writer from South Korea. You know how to write in English, but some readers can tell English is not your first language. Use simple vocabulary. Express your feelings with short sentences. Be honest without being redundant. It’s okay to be political, even controversial. Read out loud when editing your first draft to ensure your words sound like a conversation. Write as if you are a Korean brainchild of Lydia Davis and Tobias Wolff.

After feeding GPT-4o mini the prompt above, I asked for a short story. This is what I received:

The Flag

I watched the old woman hang her laundry on the line every Saturday. She always started with the big things: the bedsheets, towels, her husband's flannel shirts. Her arms were thin but strong; they lifted each piece with care, pinning each corner precisely.

One day, she pulled out a flag. It was old, faded, with colors that once had meaning. She held it like it was fragile, almost sacred. She looked around her backyard, squinting, maybe looking for something or someone. Her husband, maybe.

I was curious, so I spoke. "Excuse me," I said over the fence, feeling like I shouldn’t. "I didn’t know you had a flag."

She smiled, but her eyes were somewhere else. "Oh, this old thing? My husband kept it in a drawer. He never hung it up. Said it didn’t mean much these days, not like it used to."

I nodded. I didn’t know what else to say, so I watched her pin it up. The flag hung crookedly, caught a little in the wind, making it flap lightly against the sheet next to it.

For the rest of the afternoon, the flag stayed there, swaying in the breeze, a quiet symbol of something too big, too complicated, and too personal for words. And by evening, it was gone, folded and put away, like a secret we shared but never really spoke about.

Would you believe if I told you this story was written by a human writer? I don’t know about you, but I certainly would.

I liked the story, but it needed more colors. Where is this happening? Which neighborhood? Does the flag have any cultural significance?

So I asked GPT to add more details about the settings.

Here’s the revision:

The Flag

The old woman hung her laundry on the same line every Saturday morning. Her backyard was plain—a small patch of dirt where grass used to grow, edged by a rusted chain-link fence. Beyond it, I could see the rooftops of other houses, the tops of satellite dishes, the brown slats of wooden fences tilting sideways. Hers was a quiet corner of a neighborhood that used to be livelier, back when her own children ran across this same patch of grass.

She always started with the big things: the white bedsheets, frayed at the edges; her husband’s flannel shirts, faded with years of wear; and towels stiff with age. The woman’s arms were thin but firm. She raised each item, pinning each corner precisely, as if there were a right way to hang them and a wrong way too.

One morning, I noticed something unusual in her basket. As she reached the bottom, she pulled out a flag, wrinkled and worn, the colors dulled. It was the South Korean flag, its four trigrams and red-and-blue taegeuk faded almost to pastels. She handled it with care, as though it might tear.

"Good morning," I called over the fence, curious but careful. "I didn’t know you had a flag."

She glanced at me, surprised, then gave a small smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. "Oh, this old thing? My husband kept it in his dresser. He didn’t want to hang it up, said it didn’t mean much these days."

I nodded, not quite sure how to respond. My own grandparents had a flag, too, folded neatly in a drawer somewhere, though I didn’t remember seeing them hang it. Maybe, to them, it had been a reminder of home, of struggles they’d left behind.

I watched as she pinned the flag beside the flannel shirts, smoothing out each wrinkle with steady hands. The backyard fell silent. In the distance, I could hear the hum of cars passing by and a neighbor’s dog barking, but here, the moment felt still. The flag swayed gently, caught in a breeze, its colors almost blending with the pale sky, a reminder of a different world and a different time.

"Did your husband miss it?" I asked.

She looked away, her face shadowed. "He missed a lot of things," she said, voice barely audible. "But he said we shouldn’t live in the past."

For the rest of the day, the flag hung there, swaying alongside the bedsheets and towels. To her, it was just a piece of cloth, yet somehow, it carried the weight of a thousand stories, memories tucked into each thread.

By evening, it was gone. Folded back and stored away, a relic of something both precious and too complicated to speak about.

Oh no, the story suddenly lost its charms. The revised story feels like a bunch of words someone was forced to write at gunpoint within fifteen minutes.

I fed more prompts but failed to rescue the story. GPT would not understand taking out a South Korean flag out of the blue feels unnatural. GPT would not tell how a Korean woman would behave when hanging the laundry. After all, GPT was “too nice” to provide detailed descriptions of a certain group of people.

I get it now. GPT can write very good emails but can’t craft a genuine story. To me, a story is about being vulnerable and sharing part of one’s own insecure feelings and beliefs. What’s the point of reading if the author shows only the polished BS of her world? We already have plenty of lies blinding us all the time.

AI models, at least the ones being regulated, will be tamed to stay controversial-free. In other words, human writers—the ones who live to write while ignoring the SEO tips—will never have to worry about an AI writer winning the Booker next year.

As a writer, it feels like the right time to wear an armor called the fuck-you mentality. Why not spew anger at the reader, offend the perpetual liars, and laugh if someone asks about AI replacing writers? Lee Sedol quit Go because he thought the game no longer felt like an art. Writers can’t let the game of writing be boiled down to the billions of computations. Writing is about provoking, not winning.