Ask an AI chatbot to brainstorm names for a podcast, Wi-Fi network, or small business. You’ll likely wind up with a list of suggestions that sound a little… well, same-y.
Large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini won’t have any problem cranking out a dozen names for your pet project or website. But getting a dozen names that are truly diverse, unique, and punchy? That’s a lot trickier to do—but still possible. You just need to know how to push them the right way in a couple different directions.
First, ask ChatGPT not for just 10 or 20 ideas but 100. A Wharton School study [PDF] suggests that when you ask AI for that many ideas, they get more interesting the further down you go on the list. This is the “dump” part of this two-stage prompting technique.
For the second stage, ask ChatGPT to sift through the list, look for items that are similar, and replace them with new ones, all with the goal of creating the broadest and most diverse pool of ideas.
Here’s an example of stage one of the prompt:
Give me 100 ideas for [topic]. Number them 1–100. Give only a short title or name for each—no explanations, no descriptions. Include the obvious, the bad, the weird, and half-baked fragments. Don’t filter for quality; that comes next. Quantity is the only goal.
Once the AI delivers its list, follow up with stage two:
Now revise the list for maximum diversity. Wherever two or more ideas rely on the same basic concept, keep the best one and replace the others with ideas from angles nothing else on the list covers. The goal is 100 ideas where no two point at the same underlying concept—different in kind, not just in wording.
Optionally, you can follow up with a stage three prompt that gets the AI to filter the list by quality (but I suggest going through all 100 of the stage-two ideas yourself):
What are the 10 most interesting ideas on the second list?
I tried this “100-idea” prompt (which I’ve adapted from a prompt pairing presented in the above Wharton study) for a dream I’ve long held: opening my own coffee shop. One of the biggest hurdles, of course, is picking a clever name, so I fired up this two-stage prompt.
I won’t bore you with the entire list of suggestions I got, but here are the first 10 from the initial pool:
- The Daily Grind
- Bean There
- Brewed Awakening
- Central Perk
- The Coffee House
- Morning Cup
- Java Junction
- Common Grounds
- Cup & Bean
- The Roasted Bean
Yep, the usual suspects, right down to “Central Perk” from Friends.
After the second-stage prompt and the optional third stage (“give me the 10 most interesting names from the second list”), I wound up with these:
- Warm Noise
- Morning Object
- Public Living Room
- Moth & Match
- Localhost
- Borrowed Sugar
- Unfinished Sentence
- Blue Hour
- The Loading Bar
- Sunday Weather
These are truly different, out-of-the-box ideas for the name of my future coffee shop. Some of them are a tad tech-y (“Localhost”) or just plain odd (“Morning Object”), but others grabbed my attention. I actually like “Blue Hour” and “Borrowed Sugar” quite a bit.
Give this two-stage “100-idea” prompt a try the next time you need ideas. Even if it doesn’t yield the perfect name for a coffee shop, podcast, or blog, it’ll at least get your creative juices flowing.