How to Prompt AI for a Better — If Still Imperfect — Will

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John Ross has experimented with structured AI prompts designed to produce legally sounder wills than a simple 'make me a will' request. His approach breaks the will into its component parts — family identification, asset disposition, executor appointment — and queries the user on each section separately, rather than asking AI to generate the whole document at once. He found that AI performs much better on small, focused tasks than on large documents, where it tends to compress and omit detail. A well-structured prompt, he says, would have caught most of the errors in the ChatGPT will reviewed in this episode. For people who will use AI regardless, the basic prompting framework is: tell the AI what role it is playing (e.g., 'you are an estate planning attorney'), give it specific facts about the people involved and the state whose law applies, and then set boundaries on what you want it to produce. Ross noted that iterating — feeding the AI-generated draft back to the same AI and asking it to find problems — can help, though the AI may eventually start looping and flagging non-issues to keep 'pleasing' the user.