When TikTok Monetization set out to launch its first AI chatbot, I spotted a critical gap: AI-generated copy would surface in the UI without content design oversight. To close it, I pioneered a collaboration with the LLM Engineering team—writing system prompts, training the model, and evaluating responses. This work established TikTok’s first hybrid content–prompt design role and ensured the chatbot spoke in brand, style, and voice.
Started from a basic one page long system prompt without any UI, style, voice & tone instructions.
Grew to a 7 section monster in the code base.
Highlights from the process
Found out that LLMs are fickle and need handholding throughout their learning process. Getting the model to learn basic things like contractions and word count are good examples.
Here’s a look at how the model (and our UI design) has grown over rounds of tuning & learning.