Begin mastering prompt engineering with this step-by-step guide
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Generative artificial intelligence has become a powerful tool for enhancing productivity and tackling everyday tasks. These tools can create new content, including text, images and even code, based on the input they receive. While the potential of these tools is immense, to effectively harness their power requires a specific skill set — the ability to write good prompts.
Prompts are the instructions we give AI tools to guide their output. Think of them as the modern equivalent of computer code, but written in natural language. Just as with traditional programming, there are effective and ineffective ways to craft prompts. Let’s explore the art of prompt writing and how to maximize the potential of generative AI.
What Makes A Great Prompt?
The key to a great prompt lies in clear, unambiguous communication. It’s important to remember that AI, for all its power, cannot read our minds. The more specific and detailed our instructions, the more likely we are to receive useful output.
Consider this scenario: You ask an AI to “write a social media post to promote my business.” The AI will attempt to fulfill this request, but without crucial information about your products, services, target audience or unique selling points, the result is likely to be generic and unhelpful.
On the other hand, a well-crafted prompt that includes all necessary context will yield much more effective results. There are specific techniques that can enhance your prompt-writing skills.
Tips For Writing Great AI Prompts
Here are some pointers that anyone can use to start crafting more effective AI prompts:
1. Assign A Role To The AI
Start by telling the AI what role you want it to play while it’s helping you out. After all, if you want legal advice, you’d talk to a lawyer, and if you want marketing advice, you’d talk to a marketing expert. Start your conversation by telling it to “act as a lawyer” (or an engineer, or a zoologist, or whoever you think would be most helpful) to put it in the right frame of mind when it is giving you advice.
Example: “Act as a marketing expert specializing in social media campaigns for small businesses.”
2. Start At The End
This sounds counterintuitive, but make sure you have a clear idea of the results you hope to achieve before you start writing your prompt. This means you can be precise about the type of output you want. For example, if you want a social media schedule, you can tell it in what format you want it. Or, if you want help with writing an essay, you can tell it what length you need and what style and tone it should adopt.
Example: “Create a weekly social media content calendar for Instagram, including post types, optimal posting times and engagement strategies.”
3. Break Tasks Down Into Manageable Chunks
Instead of creating a long, complex prompt asking the AI to carry out a complicated task, break it down into smaller steps. For example, if you want to create a business plan, don’t just ask, “Write a business plan for a coffee shop,” or you’ll end up with something very generic and useless. But if you create specific prompts asking it to create all the individual elements of a business plan — an overview, descriptions of products and services, market analysis and so on — giving it the necessary information for each one, you’ll end up with something much more useful.
Example: Instead of “Write a business plan for a coffee shop,” try:
- “Outline the key sections of a coffee shop business plan.”
- “For each section, list the essential information to include.”
- “Draft an executive summary for a premium, ethically sourced coffee shop in a busy urban area.”
4. Provide Data It Needs To Make Decisions
All of the commonly used AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Claude, let you supplement their training data by uploading additional information or pointing them to online resources. This helps to ensure they have up-to-date background information and context before you set them to work on a task.
Example: Upload a recent market analysis, strategy documents, a competitor analysis and a customer feedback analysis before asking it to create a business plan.
5. Use Examples to Guide Output
If you have examples of outputs that are similar to what you are trying to achieve — for example, past social media posts to promote your business, successful job ads or letters you have written — then share them with the AI. This will help to guide the AI toward producing more relevant output.
Example: “Here’s an example of our typical Instagram post: [Insert example]. Create five more posts in a similar style, focusing on our ethically sourced beans.”
If You Aren’t Sure What It Needs To Know, Ask
Generative AI tools like ChatGPT know a lot of things, but they don’t know everything. If you aren’t sure that it will have all the information it needs, ask it. This will tell you what it needs to know so you can plug the holes in its knowledge and stop it from guessing facts and information that it doesn’t know.
Example: “I want to create a marketing plan for my coffee shop. What additional information do you need from me to create an effective plan?”
Prompt Engineering: An Essential Future Skill
As AI continues to integrate into our personal and professional lives, the ability to effectively communicate with these systems — called prompt engineering — will become an increasingly valuable skill. It’s likely to be a key component of technological literacy, taught in schools and sought after by employers.
Mastering prompt engineering prepares us for a future when our professional value is partly defined by our ability to collaborate with intelligent machines. By honing these skills now, we’re investing in our future success and adaptability.
Practical Application And Next Steps
To start developing your prompt engineering skills:
- Practice with freely available AI tools like ChatGPT or Google Bard.
- Start with simple tasks and gradually increase complexity.
- Experiment with different prompt structures and compare results.
- Join online communities or forums dedicated to prompt engineering to learn from others and share experiences.
Remember, effective prompt writing is a skill that improves with practice. The more you engage with AI tools, the better you’ll become at crafting prompts that yield powerful results.
