Spent 3 hours fighting ChatGPT to write a simple email subject line

I needed a 5 word subject line for a client proposal and the AI kept giving me 12 word essays. After 20 rewrites I just did it myself in 30 seconds. Has anyone else noticed these tools overthink the easy stuff?

2 comments

2 Comments

ninas674d agoRising Star

It's like these tools get so hung up on being thorough they forget what the job actually is. A subject line is supposed to be short and punchy, not a full paragraph. Your experience matches mine with a lot of AI writing stuff - it treats a simple request like a complex problem that needs solving. The trick I've found is you have to be really blunt with it. Like, literally tell it "make this exactly five words, no more, no less" and sometimes it still fights you. It's good for brainstorming but terrible at knowing when to stop. You end up spending more time teaching the AI to do a simple task than it would take to just write it yourself.

wendysanchez4d ago

Exactly my frustration too. You ask for something simple and it gives you a whole essay like it's trying to impress an English teacher. It's exhausting having to fight a tool just to get a basic one-liner that does the job.