Writing Compelling Pet Bios Using ChatGPT

Adoption bios are one of the most critical parts of content creation and may be most likely to suffer if you’re feeling some creative burnout. When you are facing down dozens or even hundreds of bios every week, there are some amazing ways that AI can be an absolute lifesaver. Want to learn more about ChatGPT and AI writing tools? Check out part one of this series

 

After lots of experimenting, here are some important ground rules we’ve discovered for using ChatGPT for adoption bios (Click on any of the images/screenshots below to enlarge):

  • AI-assisted bios will only be as good as the information you provide. There are some super fun and creative ways ChatGPT and other tools can create engaging bios but in your prompt, you need to provide some identifying information like age, name, some favorite things or observed behaviors, and any criteria that are important to include. There’s no substitute for quality input if you’re looking for the best output.

 

  • Create or edit with a core goal of removing barriers to adoption. To keep a commitment to barrier-free yet informative bios you’ll need to be hyper-aware that AI is making decisions about what it writes based on patterns and referencing a vast collection of materials that were used to train it. There are just as many not-so-great pet bios out there that help to “educate” ChatGPT as there are wonderful ones, and the predictive text that it creates will draw on all of them equally. For best results, try to provide as much barrier-free information in the prompt, and be prepared to edit.
    • Similarly, ChatGPT won’t solve the inherent problems of highly restrictive adoption policies. If this is something your organization is struggling with or hasn’t considered recently, start here instead and work through all the ways that marketing is inextricably tied to your organization’s policies.

      In this example, the bio is limited and exclusionary because of the information provided is similarly limited and laden with restrictions.

 

  • ChatGPT and other AI tools can tend towards longer-form answers. Attention spans are at an all-time low. Don’t be tempted by the 5-6 paragraphs that ChatGPT likes to spit out. With enough experimenting, you’ll likely notice a pattern that AI falls into of rewriting the prompt in the first paragraph and summarizing in the final paragraph. Eliminate as much repetitiveness as possible. If the write-up is a little too lengthy, make your next prompt something like “Can you provide a more concise bio for the same animal?” or even ask for bullet points!

 

  • After you write your bio for a website or search engine, ask ChatGPT to help create a social-ready caption or post too! Since ChatGPT is conversational, you can build on previous questions and it will retain the initial content. You can even share a bit about your brand to help get closer to your own voice / tone. 

 

  • Use ChatGPT to help with specific wording or language questions. By now you know we’re fanatics about watching the words we use – not only to ensure accurate yet positive marketing but also to break down barriers in understanding and access – so it’s no surprise we’re proponents of using new tech to find better terminology and plain wording for pet bios. Using this method you can write some of a bio yourself and then fill in other areas with information you generated with AI!

 

  • Break out the creative or out-of-the-box stops for long-stay pets. An out-of-the-ordinary pet description can’t be your only go-to strategy for bios (more on general bio writing tips here!) but for pets who are being overlooked or experiencing a longer length of stay, getting hyper-creative can put them in the spotlight: And ChatGPT can help give you ideas.

Are you using ChatGPT or any other AI tools to assist your bios? Tell us (or better yet, show us the links!) in the comments below!

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Caitlin Quinn

Caitlin Quinn

Caitlin is passionate about working with shelters and rescues to reimagine the way they tell their stories and connect with new audiences. She has served in the animal welfare field since 2008 and early on had the honor of working closely with diverse organizations across the U.S. to maximize resources, redesign policies, and find life-changing marketing solutions. In 2015, she got her MPA with a concentration in nonprofit management and in 2021, she began teaching marketing + communications for the University of Florida Master of Veterinary Science, Concentration in Shelter Medicine program. She lives in NY with a petite brindle pit bull named Sally who owns her heart.

3 Comments

  1. Chris Chris on May 2, 2023 at 8:42 pm

    Great article. I was recently thinking that a cool idea for an open source web app would be a simple wrapper around chatGBT for this purpose. The user could select from a predefined list of pet descriptors (e.g., “good with kids,” “lots of energy,” “sweet”), and the app would send the prompt off to the chatGBT API and return the bio. Do you think something like that would be useful, or is it too niche? Another use case that I was thinking about is that the app could scrape pet bios from Petfinder posted by rescue orgs, parse out their keywords, then feed those into chatGBT to rewrite the blurb to be more engaging.



  2. Dawn Braniff Dawn Braniff on May 11, 2023 at 8:30 am

    Hi Caitlin,
    I am interested in trying out the ChatGPT but I noticed there are multiple apps with that in the name. Would you mind telling me which company’s you use?
    Thanks for the great article!