Prompt Engineering for Beginners - Learn ChatGPT Prompting

There is an element of mystery and awe when approaching a powerful generative AI tool, such as ChatGPT. There is beauty in the simplicity of the interface, and for me personally, it was love at first prompt.

This simplicity in the interface is as close to a frictionless experience in software that I have ever encountered. You have an input box awaiting your first prompt, and you never know for sure what its response will be. Enter the same prompt multiple times and you will likely receive varying answers. There’s a certain excitement to that unknown, and I want you to realize that at its core essence, every prompt is a journey.

Every chat, whether it begins and ends with a single prompt, or hundreds, starts its life as a blank canvas. And there is a mixture of fear and amazement once you realize the implications of this powerful tool, hidden behind this simple interface.

While it is true that anyone can prompt and that any prompt is nothing more than a string of words placed together, the same could be said of novels. The reason that this course exists is to fully equip you with making the most of your prompts and introducing you to new tools and techniques to add more and more prompting tools to your own toolbox, to maximize your effectiveness in this increasingly essential and in-demand new skill.

We have entered a new era where the ability to code has now been superseded by the ability to prompt.

At its core, prompting is like programming, but instead of being required to learn a new language, complete with obtuse syntax and strict rules, you can approach this new programming language not with code but your native language and vocabulary.

This has burst open the doors of creativity, productivity and has made attainable that which was elusive, to become a creator. The exclusive domain enjoyed by the coding few has now crossed the chasm to the masses!

So let’s start our journey together in starting to fill in your canvas of understanding prompts by next exploring the importance of prompts in AI conversations.

What is a prompt? In the context of AI, a prompt is an input that we provide to an AI model to guide its responses. It's like a question, a statement, or a task that we want the AI to address. The prompt can range from something as simple as 'tell me a joke', to something complex like 'write a summary of the latest climate change report'. It's how we communicate our needs to the AI.

But prompts aren't all created equal. Depending on the context and the nature of the task, we often deal with different types of prompts.

My goal for this course is to get you well acquainted and comfortable with this multitude of prompt types and techniques, so that your AI arsenal is complete.

The role of prompts in guiding AI responses is crucial. The prompt you choose can dramatically influence the quality, relevance, and usefulness of the AI's response. A well-crafted prompt can guide the AI to generate highly accurate, creative, or insightful responses, while a poorly designed prompt can lead to irrelevant or erroneous output.

Now, let's delve into the importance of prompts. The prompt serves as our primary mode of communication with AI. It's our way of telling the AI what we need from it. The effectiveness of our interaction with AI largely depends on the quality of our prompts.

A well-designed prompt can elicit insightful, creative, or precise responses from the AI, making our interaction with it more productive and enjoyable. On the other hand, a poorly crafted prompt might result in irrelevant or even erroneous responses.

Prompts play a significant role across a wide range of AI applications. Whether you're using AI for business analytics, education, content creation, or entertainment, the way you craft your prompts can greatly influence the quality and usefulness of the AI's output.

What makes a good prompt? A good prompt is clear, concise, and specific. It precisely communicates the task to the AI while leaving enough room for the AI to generate creative and insightful responses.

Balance is key here. Too vague, and the AI may not understand your intention. Too restrictive, and you might stifle the AI's potential for creativity.

Despite its importance, crafting effective prompts is not always easy. It requires a good understanding of the AI's capabilities and limitations, as well as creativity and precision in communication.

Some common challenges include handling ambiguity, dealing with the AI's lack of real-world knowledge or context, and navigating its sometimes literal interpretation of prompts.

This brings us to an important concept - Prompt Engineering. It is the process of designing prompts to optimize the performance of AI models. By understanding and mastering prompt engineering, we can make our interactions with AI more effective and productive.

As AI technology continues to evolve, prompt engineering is emerging as a key skill in the field of AI. It holds the potential to dramatically enhance the capabilities of AI applications across various sectors.

Prompt engineering is a valuable skill in several job roles, particularly those that involve working with language models and AI technologies. Here are 10 job titles where prompt engineering skills would be beneficial:

1. AI/NLP Engineer: This role often involves working with natural language processing models like GPT-3. The ability to formulate effective prompts can greatly enhance the performance of these models.

2. Data Scientist: While not every data scientist will work with language models, those who do can benefit from understanding how to craft effective prompts.

3. Machine Learning Engineer: These professionals develop and deploy machine learning models, including language models. They can use prompt engineering to improve model output.

4. Conversational AI Designer: These professionals design and develop conversational AI experiences, like chatbots. Crafting effective prompts is crucial to making these experiences feel natural and intuitive.

5. AI Product Manager: Product managers overseeing AI products need to understand how different factors, including prompts, can affect a model's performance.

6. AI Researcher: Researchers working on new language models or AI technologies can use prompt engineering to guide their models and achieve better results.

7. Chatbot Developer: These professionals develop chatbots for various uses, such as customer service, and can use prompts to guide the chatbot's responses.

8. UX Writer for AI: These professionals focus on the user experience aspect of AI products, ensuring the language models provide responses that are useful and intuitive to users.

9. Content Strategist for AI: They create and manage AI content strategies. Good prompts help in delivering the right content at the right time.

10. AI Trainer: These professionals are responsible for training AI models, including language models. Crafting effective prompts can enhance the training process and the model's eventual performance.

These are just a few examples, and this skill can be useful in any role that involves interacting with or developing AI models, particularly models that use natural language processing.

ChatGPT and other generative AI tools can serve as your own personal learning assistant!

In this section of the course, we will explore various prompting techniques so that you can learn new topics with the help of your new AI learning assistant. We will accomplish this by employing three common learning methodologies with the follow focus:

• Subject-Focused

• Problem-Focused

• Learner-Focused

Let’s engineer prompts to learn something new, starting with subject-focused prompting, starting in the next lesson!

Subject-focused prompting allows us to steer ChatGPT toward the heart of the subject you want to study. This is ideal when you're learning a new topic from scratch. Subject-focused prompting involves explicitly mentioning the desired subject or providing context related to that subject within the conversation. This helps ensure that the model's responses stay relevant to the intended topic.

If you could sum up our prior lesson’s topic of subject-focused prompting, you would characterize those types of prompts as something along the lines of “Tell me more about____ fill in the blank. For this lesson we are now dealing with problem-focused learning prompts. The key here is that we are trying to come up with solutions to our problems, and to get to the heart of the matter, we need to get specific with ChatGPT regarding what our problems we are trying to solve are.

Learner-focused prompts, also known as the Learner-Centered Approach, prioritize your interests, needs, and individual learning styles. This approach aims to personalize your learning experience by adapting to your pace, interests, and preferred ways of learning. With learner-focused prompts, you are encouraged to actively engage with the content generated by ChatGPT and explore topics that align with your personal interests. This not only enhances your motivation but also greatly improves retention when learning something new.

Let’s walk through several examples of prompts you could use to elicit learner-focused responses from ChatGPT, encouraging open-ended exploration and reflective questioning. For demonstration purposes, I am going to be prompting ChatGPT learner-focused prompts in order to learn more about the topic of Chess. I encourage you to follow along in your own ChatGPT account and feel free to replace Chess with your own topic of interest. And don’t forget to access my specific prompts that I have shared in the resources! Let me share my screen and we’ll walk through several learner-focused prompts together!

In this section of the course, you’ll be introduced to several different types of prompts.

Here we will learn zero-shot prompts, one-shot prompts, few shot prompts and in addition to these various ‘shot’ approaches to prompting, we will explore Chain of Thought prompting.

Chain of Thought prompts are often represented as the acronym C.O.T or COT.

Becoming familiar with these different prompt types will help you elicit desired responses from an AI such as ChatGPT.

So let’s start with chain of thought prompts, starting in the next lesson!

You may have often performed chain of thought prompts without even realizing it. As you prompt and receive responses from ChatGPT, this can often result in new thoughts and questions coming to your mind. You can follow your fancy and dive deeper into different paths and branches inside of the same chat and end up far afield from where you originated.

This phenomenon has been called many things, such as a prompt wheel, a prompt chain, but what seems to be coming into wider acceptance is the term chain-of-thought prompts, often shortened to CoT.

Let’s build upon our work in the previous section where we explored the different focused prompts for learning new topics. As a reminder, those were:

• subject-focused

• problem- focused

• learner-focused prompts

While I could simply demo a single example of a subject-focused CoT prompt, instead, I want to show you how you can prompt ChatGPT to generate an unlimited number of examples for you. The beauty of this approach is not only do you get many examples to learn from, but this builds you an ever increasingly valuable prompt library of your own as your chats are saved in your account history for later exploits!

And I encourage you to follow along in your own account, either performing the same prompts as myself, or you can always grab the prompt link from the resources section and continue the conversation in your own account.

A zero-shot prompt provides no prior examples to ChatGPT or any other AI tool, and it's expected to understand the task solely from the prompt. A zero-shot prompt may fall outside its training data. The AI tool is expected to generate a meaningful response or perform a task without being necessarily trained on that particular prompt. It leverages its understanding of language and general knowledge to generate relevant outputs, making inferences or providing answers based on its pre-existing knowledge. Zero-shot prompts enable the model to generalize and perform tasks beyond its explicitly trained capabilities.

Let’s prompt ChatGPT for examples of Zero-Shot Prompts!

Zero Shot Chain of Thought (Zero-shot-CoT) prompting involves a slight tweak to a simple zero-shot prompt, such as appending the words "Let's think step by step." to the end of your zero shot prompt. This guides ChatGPT to generate a chain of thought to answer your question. This zero shot chain of thought approach helps extract more complete and thorough answers without the need for specific prior training.

So ‘let’s think step by step’ with ChatGPT

The model is given just one example of the results you want in a one shot prompt, which is explored in this lesson.