A Journalist’s Guide to AI Story Generation: From Basic Prompts to Custom GPTs

Step-by-step workflow for brainstorming story ideas with AI

AI can be an excellent brainstorming companion, as long as you know how to prompt it. (Credit: Midjourney)

Journalists live and die by their ideas. If you don’t have ’em, staring at a deadline is panic-inducing. 

Luckily, large language models (LLMs)are great at brainstorming ideas. If you’ve got a set of notes or already written stories you’d like to mine for some story ideas, AI tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Perplexity can get you thinking of new angles to explore. 

The Setup

For AI to help you brainstorm story ideas, you need more than a ChatGPT Plus or Perplexity Pro subscription. You need a plan and a prompt. Your plan is to create a custom GPT on ChatGPT, a “Gem” on Google Gemini or a Space on Perplexity. These are similar concepts in that they allow you to program your own custom instructions and files while also searching the web for outside information. But in each case, you’ll need a paid account to access it. 

Once you’re subbed up, create a custom GPT on ChatGPT. The setup is very similar to Perplexity Spaces. You’ll be asked to create a description and a name. ChatGPT will suggest a name if you describe what you’re looking for and even generate a little icon. For me, it went with a custom GPT called “Story Spark,” which wasn’t bad, but I didn’t care enough to spend much time noodling over the branding.

Now, let’s get into the highly detailed prompts that will create exactly the kind of AI-powered idea generator you want.