- What the Wharton research found about brainstorming with ChatGPT
- Prompts that force variety
- Prompts for business and marketing ideas
- Prompts for problem solving
- Prompts to narrow down
- Prompts for team brainstorms
- Prompts for personal and creative ideas
- How to get better brainstorming from ChatGPT
- My advice on ChatGPT prompts for brainstorming
- Frequently asked questions
The best ChatGPT prompts for brainstorming force variety: ask for ideas from different angles, audiences and constraints, and make it think through a list step by step instead of firing off its first thoughts. That matters because Wharton researchers found ChatGPT improves individual ideas but makes a group's ideas much more alike.
I brainstorm with ChatGPT almost every day, for content, campaigns and the odd naming emergency. It never runs out of energy, which is lovely. But I noticed something before I read the research: ask it the same kind of question twice and you get suspiciously similar answers. The prompts below are designed around that weakness, so you get a wide spread of ideas rather than ten versions of one.
What the Wharton research found about brainstorming with ChatGPT
Researchers at Wharton have studied AI brainstorming closely. Here's what the Mack Institute reports:
| Finding | What it means for your prompts |
|---|---|
| ChatGPT can make individual ideas more creative but significantly reduces the diversity of a group's ideas (Nature Human Behaviour paper) | Don't let everyone in a team ask the same question the same way |
| Inventing toys from a brick and a fan, 94% of ChatGPT-assisted ideas overlapped, and nine people named their toy Build-a-Breeze Castle | Expect sameness unless you push against it |
| Across five experiments, diversity dropped significantly in 37 of 45 comparisons | This isn't a one-off quirk |
| A working paper found prompt engineering can substantially improve diversity, and Chain-of-Thought prompting gave the most diverse ideas | Ask it to reason through a list step by step, and vary your prompts |
The catch: the more you rely on one prompt, the narrower your ideas get. Rotate angles, add constraints and have people write their own ideas first before asking ChatGPT.
Prompts that force variety
Use these to break ChatGPT out of its first answer.
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Brainstorm ideas for [goal]. First, list ten very different angles you could approach it from. Then, step by step, generate two ideas for each angle, making each one as different from the others as possible.
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Give me ideas for [goal] from the point of view of five different people: a child, a sceptic, an expert, a newcomer and a competitor.
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Suggest ideas for [goal] that would work with almost no time, then ideas that would need a whole team. Keep the two lists different.
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Give me the most obvious idea for [goal], then ten ideas that deliberately avoid it.
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Brainstorm [goal] using a random word as a starting point for each idea. Pick ten unrelated words and explain how each sparked an idea.
Prompts for business and marketing ideas
Give the context so ideas fit your world.
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I run [business] for [audience]. Brainstorm twenty content ideas they'd find useful, grouped by the question each one answers.
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Suggest ideas for a campaign to promote [offer] that don't rely on special offers or competitions.
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What are ten unusual ways a business like mine could get in front of [audience]? Explain the thinking behind each.
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Brainstorm names for [project], in five different styles, with one line on why each might work.
Prompts for problem solving
When you're stuck rather than starting fresh.
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Here's my problem: [describe]. List the assumptions I might be making, then suggest ideas that come from questioning each assumption.
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What would the opposite of my current approach look like? Give me five ideas that do the reverse of [current approach].
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Break this problem into smaller parts and brainstorm three solutions for each part: [problem].
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How have people in completely different industries solved a problem like [problem]? Suggest ideas I could borrow.
Prompts to narrow down
Generating is half the job; choosing is the other half.
Want AI doing the heavy lifting in your marketing?
I build the systems that handle the boring 80 percent, so you get your week back. Done properly, with the human kept in.
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Here are my ideas: [paste]. Group similar ones together and tell me which groups are most crowded and which are thin.
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Score these ideas for impact, effort and how far each one stands apart from what competitors do, and explain your scores.
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Pick the three most unusual ideas from this list and suggest how I could test each one quickly.
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Combine two or three of these ideas into something stronger than any of them alone.
Prompts for team brainstorms
Use AI to widen a team's thinking, not replace it.
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Write a short brainstorming warm-up for a team of [number] working on [topic], with three prompts to get people thinking differently.
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We've already got these ideas from the team: [paste]. Suggest ideas that are clearly different from all of them.
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Suggest five questions a facilitator could ask to push a team past its first round of ideas on [topic].
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After our session, here are all the ideas on the whiteboard: [paste]. Spot duplicates, name the themes and list the ideas nobody has built on yet.
Prompts for personal and creative ideas
Brainstorming isn't only for work.
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Brainstorm ideas for a [birthday, weekend, family day] for [people and interests], from very low effort to big adventure.
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Give me twenty ideas for a creative project I could start this weekend with [materials or skills], each in a different style.
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Suggest ten ways to make [routine task] more enjoyable, each from a different angle such as music, company, setting or challenge.
How to get better brainstorming from ChatGPT
- Ask for different angles first, then ideas for each, step by step.
- Vary your prompts; the Wharton team found the same prompts produce similar ideas.
- Add constraints, odd viewpoints or random words to push it off the obvious.
- In teams, have people write their own ideas before anyone asks ChatGPT.
- Use it to sort and combine ideas as well as to generate them.
For marketing ideas, my ad angle generator prompt pack and lead magnet idea prompts give you ready-made starting points, and my AI prompt examples show how small changes to a prompt get very different results.
My advice on ChatGPT prompts for brainstorming
ChatGPT is a fantastic idea generator with one blind spot: left alone, it drifts towards the same ideas everyone else is getting. So push it. Ask for angles before ideas, make it reason through the list step by step, change your prompts and bring your own ideas to the table first. Do that, and you'll get the volume AI is good at without losing the variety that makes brainstorming worth doing.
Frequently asked questions
Is ChatGPT good for brainstorming?
Yes for volume and individual creativity, but Wharton researchers found ChatGPT-assisted ideas are much less diverse across a group, so prompt for variety.
Why does ChatGPT give similar ideas?
Research reported by Wharton's Mack Institute found ChatGPT reduces idea diversity; in one task 94% of ChatGPT-assisted ideas shared overlapping concepts.
How do I get more varied ideas from ChatGPT?
Ask for different angles first, use step-by-step reasoning, vary your prompts and add constraints. A Wharton working paper found Chain-of-Thought prompting gave the most diverse ideas.
Should teams brainstorm with ChatGPT?
Yes, but have people write their own ideas first, then use ChatGPT to find ideas that are different from the team's.
What's a good first brainstorming prompt?
Ask ChatGPT to list ten very different angles on your goal, then generate two ideas for each angle, step by step.
