Tell a story isn't helpful advice

Daniel Roth on the Gene, Mind, and Machines blog is saying what a lot of us have felt: "tell a story" is the default AI prompt, and it's usually useless. The advice is too vague — a story can be a sales pitch, a bedtime tale, a rant, or a memo. Without specifying the audience, the format, the length, or what the reader should do after reading, the model just guesses.

The fix is to be specific: who is reading this, what they already know, what you want them to do, and what tone you're aiming for. The model needs the same kind of brief a real writer would ask for.

Why this matters for us:
a gente that uses AI to draft emails, pitches, and side-hustle copy is going to waste time on fluff if they keep asking the model to "tell a story" — specificity is the difference between usable output and noise.