Never pick a bad book or movie again

How to get ChatGPT to give killer recommendations every time

I’ve seen a few posts on whether LLMs can make good recommendation systems, and the reviews are mixed.

But, I have found a way to make them great!

Instead of trying to describe what you like or give examples of what you like, you have to turn things around. “Tell me what I like. Explain to me why.”

But it’s even more subtle than that. You have to get ChatGPT to figure out why there are certain things that, by all accounts, you should like, but you don’t.

That’s where the magic is.

So here’s what I did. I said, “ChatGPT, here is a list of movies, books, and TV shows I loved. If every piece of media I digested could somehow be like these, I’d be happy. But I can’t tell what it is about these that I like. I want your help to figure this out. Here is another list of Books, TV shows, and movies that friends and recommendation algorithms thought I would like, but I ended up not liking them.”

So you tell ChatGPT those lists, and then you ask it to help you understand the differences between the things you like and the things you should have liked but didn’t. It will make you a table of what is present in the hits that is missing from the misses.

THEN you can say, “OK based on what you just learned about me, give me some recommendations for 5 books, 5 TV shows, and 5 movies that I will love.”

It will, but the problem is that you will have probably already read or watched most of the things in its first round of recommendations. It’s important that you react to these first recommendations with more feedback. If it works for you like it did for me, then almost all of its recommendations will be for things you already loved. Tell it whether it succeeded or failed, and if there are any recommendations it gives you that you didn’t like, ask it again to figure out why and update what it knows about your taste. Then keep asking for recommendations 5 at a time until you get some new ones that you haven’t read or watched.

You’ll be amazed. I have an ongoing conversation with ChatGPT where I’ve done this, and I have yet to be let down.

Give it a shot!

—Jon Christensen

ps. no call to action on this one. I just wanted to share so that you waste less of your life on boring shows.