When somebody tells me these tools are overrated, I ask them to show me what they typed. Almost every time, the problem is visible in one line.
"Write me a business proposal."
What comes back is smooth, professional and entirely useless. Not because the tool failed, but because that instruction would fail with a human being too. If you walked up to the most competent consultant in Ibadan and said only that, you would get either a blank stare or a long list of questions.
" Garbage in, garbage out. It was true of computers in 1970 and it is truer now, because the garbage comes back beautifully formatted.
A useful way to picture it
Think of a tour guide who has memorised every street, every building, every route in a city, but has never been told where you want to go.
Say "take me somewhere nice" and he will take you somewhere. It may well be nice. It will probably not be where you needed to be. The knowledge was never the constraint. The instruction was.
CROP
I use four parts, and the word CROP helps me remember them. It also carries the right idea, because what you plant determines what you harvest.
C is for Context. Who are you, what is the situation, what does the tool need to know that it cannot guess? "I run a three-year-old logistics business in Ibadan with four vans and eleven staff. We move goods for small retailers. Our margin is thin and our biggest problem is idle vehicle time."
R is for Request. What exactly do you want it to do? Not "help me with marketing." Rather: "draft a one-page offer I can send to shop owners in Dugbe — the main commercial district in Ibadan — explaining a shared-delivery service."
O is for Output style. What should the result look like? A table, a letter, five bullet points, a script I can read aloud, four hundred words, plain language a non-technical person can follow. If you do not say, you will get an essay, because an essay is the safe default.
P is for Parameters. The boundaries. Do not use jargon. Keep it under a page. Assume the reader is sceptical. Prices in naira. Do not invent statistics. This last one matters more than people realise.
The difference in practice
Compare the two.
Before: "Write me a business proposal."
After: "I run a three-year-old logistics business in Ibadan with four vans and eleven staff, moving goods for small retailers. Our vans sit idle most afternoons. Draft a one-page offer to shop owners in Dugbe market for a shared afternoon delivery service. Plain language, no jargon, under four hundred words, prices in naira, and assume the reader has been disappointed by a logistics company before. Do not invent any figures."
The second one takes ninety seconds longer to write and the result is not marginally better. It is a different category of thing. One is filler. The other is something you could send this afternoon.
The habit that matters more than the framework
I want to be careful not to leave you with only a technique, because there is something more important.
These tools make things up. The term for it is hallucination, and it is not an occasional malfunction. It is a property of how they work. They are built to produce the most plausible next piece of text, and plausible is not the same as true.
They will give you a statistic with a confident number attached. They will cite a law with a section number. They will name a book, an author and a year. Some of it will be correct. Some of it will be invented, and the invented material will look exactly like the correct material. There is no tremor in the voice.
" Fact check anything it gives you that you intend to stand behind. If your name is going on it, verify it.
This is not a reason to avoid these tools. It is a reason to stay in the chair. You are not being replaced by the machine; you are being asked to do the part it cannot do, which is to know what is true.
This week
Take one thing you asked it recently that disappointed you. Do not change tools. Rewrite the question with all four parts, and ask again.
Most people conclude that AI is not useful when what they have actually discovered is that they have not yet learned to ask. That is a far easier problem, and it is fixed in an afternoon.