In 2026, it’s no longer enough to write good prompts, but to build “Skills” for your Gen AI apps. “Skills” are essentially reusable long prompts that you can call up anytime. They can also be used with other Skills and have reference files attached to them. “Skills” are replacing user-made chatbots and I’ve switched to teaching the writing of Skills in my workshops. ChatGPT and Claude have had the Skills feature for some time now, and Gemini finally launched it recently.
Anyway, I was curious to see if a Skill could be used to generate consistent cartoon characters so I took a few hours to iterate one in ChatGPT.
My steps:
- I uploaded a real photo of myself and got ChatGPT to turn it into a Cartoon Ian.
- I iterated on the cartoon until the design style was to my liking.
- Then I co-wrote the Skill with ChatGPT to regenerate Cartoon Ian with a consistent buzz cut and a transparent background.
- I tested the Skill and it was quite inconsistent, so I had to tweak the Skill’s text content.
- Now the Skill can generate Cartoon Ian in different poses on the fly.
- Using ChatGPT Work mode (the Chat mode won’t do), I generated these five Ians at one go and pasted them into Canva to be laid out as a visual.