Prompt Engineering
What is Prompt Engineering?
The AI generated definition
Prompt engineering is the process of designing and refining prompts to optimize user experience and achieve specific goals when interacting with artificial intelligence (AI) systems. It involves understanding user behavior and psychology, as well as expertise in natural language processing and machine learning. By designing clear, concise, and contextually relevant prompts, AI systems can better understand user input and provide more accurate and helpful responses. Prompt engineering is important for creating user-friendly and effective AI systems that enhance productivity and improve the customer experience, and it is commonly used in chatbots, virtual assistants, and voice recognition systems.
The human definition
Framing your request or input in a way most likely to achieve your desired output.
A Recent Example:
"generate a shopping list so we can cook all six days of food"
I recently asked a large language model to generate a grocery list for the meal plan it had just created for me. The initial attempt at this was a raw output of every possible ingredient, additive and spice. A shopping list is no good without its quantities so I updated this to:
"create a shopping list for our updated meal plan including the quantities needed for enough food for two people"
This was closer, but I didn't want the standard pantry items so...
"create a shopping list for our updated meal plan including the quantities needed for enough food for two people. Do not include shelf stable items like peanut butter, salsa, or spices. do not include spices"
Now we were looking good... but it wanted me to purchase "8 eggs" so finally we landed at:
"create a shopping list for our updated meal plan including the quantities needed for enough food for two people. Do not include shelf stable items like peanut butter, salsa, or spices. do not include seasonings. Please use common quantities available for purchase. For example:
8 large eggs would become 1 dozen eggs"