Guest post by Obiajulum Ndubuisi, who is a tech enthusiast who loves exploring anything tech including gadgets.
Have you ever asked your AI bot to do something and it gave you an unrelated answer or just didn’t meet your expectations? It happens a lot, but the major reason could be that you didn’t provide your AI bot with the complete details. This art of knowing just what to tell your AI and predicting the result is known as AI prompt engineering.
AI Prompts To Achieve Your Desired Responses
What Are AI Prompts?
AI prompts serve as a means of communicating with generative AI models like ChatGPT and Gemini, telling them what we need done through our questions, commands, images, audio files, code samples or other forms of text, and obtaining accurate and relevant outputs.
Why Are AI Prompts Important?
With a well-crafted prompt, your AI model will provide you with accurate and relevant outputs to efficiently solve complex problems. If you don’t define your AI prompt properly, the large language model (LLM) output might be vague, misleading, off-topic, inaccurate or biased.
How Do AI Prompts Work?
Generative AI uses natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to decode and comprehend a user’s message in an AI prompt. Whenever an AI model receives a prompt, it references the patterns it has learned from the training data, which is composed of large data sets to help ensure more accurate results. The AI model then weighs the possibilities, considering how different words and ideas relate to each other, and responds based on what it has learnt. From these results, the model fine-tunes its response, ensuring that it is relevant to the input. This is known as inference.
What Can AI Prompts Do?
Generative AI is used in almost every aspect of our lives, from our grammar checkers in word processors to our autocomplete in messaging apps. Here are some examples.
Summarisation – You can copy and paste text on the AI platform and prompt it to give you only the necessary details. For example,
“Hi ChatGPT, here is an excerpt of an article on the solar system [Copy-paste text here]. Can you summarize the most important points about the heavenly bodies including their time of rotation and revolution?”
Classification – Provide the AI model with input and ask it to assign a relevant label or category. For example,
“Here is a database of customer reviews for an e-commerce website. Classify the responses as ‘Positive,’ ‘Negative,’ or ‘Neutral’ and tally the responses for each category.”
Translation – You can also ask your AI chatbots to translate sentences into different languages. For instance,
“Translate the phrase ‘I love popcorn’ from English to Korean.”
Text generation/completion – Your chatbots are also capable of generating stories, letters, emails, articles and any type of text you can think of. For example,
“I am writing a cover letter for my first data entry job. Here are some bullet points about my accomplishments and educational background [insert here]. Generate a cover letter using these points.”
You can ask your chatbot to write the final paragraph of an email or story.
“Once upon a time, in a town far away, there lived a small mouse named…”
Question answering – AI chatbots also answer questions asked by users. They rely on their training data to supply relevant answers.For example,
“What are the steps to creating a user flow for a UX design project?”
Coaching – You can ask your chatbot to rate your work or offer suggestions on how to improve write-ups like letters or essays. Here is an example.
“How would you improve the following script for a YouTube video about generative AI? [Insert copy here].”
Image generation – Generative AI can generate pictures that look very realistic. The viral picture of the Pope in a puffy coat proves this. For instance,
“Generate a picture of a mountain goat in a forest, surreal, fantasy, digital art.”
The Recipe For Effective AI Prompts
Identify the goal: Know exactly what you want the AI model to do and how you want it done. For example,
“Generate a 1000-word blog post on eating healthy foods. Provide examples of nutritious and junk foods. Include ways to maintain a healthy diet and the benefits.”
Be specific and provide context: AI prompts live and die on details. Include precise details like features, colour or texture. For instance, “Create a picture of a girl” doesn’t yield results as useful as “Generate a picture of an African girl in middle school waving at her parents who just dropped her off at her school gate. She is putting on a tracksuit and carrying her school bag.” You can also specify if you want a pencil sketch, oil painting, or artwork in the style of known artists.
Ask open-ended questions: Instead of asking, “Is being a vegetarian good for your health?” the AI prompt could ask, “What are some pros and cons of not eating animal meat on health?”
Input format and examples: If the need arises, give examples to show the desired format or style of the response.
“Here are the first six lines of Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ [insert text here]. Write a paragraph about choosing the right college in a similar style.”
Your AI prompts should be specific, include only the necessary details, and not contain conflicting terms that might confuse the AI model. This will give you accurate responses and increase your productivity.
Writer’s bio
Obiajulum Ndubuisi is a tech enthusiast who loves exploring anything tech including gadgets. When not writing, you can find her playing badminton or reading a novel.
Website: stephieaj.blogspot.com
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