Below you'll find prompt engineering tips that will help you get better answers from an AI chatbot. According to IBM, "Prompt engineering is the process of writing, refining and optimizing inputs, or “prompts,” to encourage generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems" to get better results.
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Be Clear and Specific in Prompts: Craft your prompts to be as clear and specific as possible. This helps the AI understand your request better and generate more relevant responses.
Provide Context: If your question or request relies on context, provide that context upfront. This gives the AI the necessary background information to generate a coherent response.
Iterate and Experiment: If you're not satisfied with the initial response, don't hesitate to experiment with different phrasings or approaches. Sometimes a slight rephrasing can lead to a more accurate or insightful answer.
Edit and Refine: The initial output from the AI might not be perfect, but it can serve as a starting point. Edit and refine the generated text to make it more accurate, coherent, and aligned with your needs.
Prompt Engineering: Experiment with different approaches to your prompts. You can use techniques like asking the AI to debate pros and cons, summarize information, create tables, generate website code, provide examples, or think step by step through a process.
Post-Processing: After getting a response, you can apply post-processing to improve grammar, coherence, and clarity. This step can help make the generated text more polished.
Guidance through Instructions: You can explicitly instruct the AI about the style, tone, or format you want the response in. For example, you can ask the AI to explain something in simple terms, as if you were explaining it to a child.
Knowledge Verification: Generative AI might not always provide accurate information. If possible, verify the information it gives you through reliable sources. Be sure the citations AI generated are real sources!
Understanding AI Limitations: Be aware that generative AI is not infallible. It might generate creative or imaginative responses that aren't entirely accurate. Always use critical thinking and human judgment when evaluating the generated content.
Use as a Creative Tool: Generative AI can be a great tool for brainstorming, creative writing, and ideation. Use its outputs as a starting point for your own creative work.
Use caution with auto complete tools! Auto complete tools in Google, emails, word processing programs (ex. Microsoft Word) are not always accurate. Auto complete may provide a text suggestion as you're typing, but be careful that the text it's giving is accurate.
Example: Google suggested altering Robert Frost's "from wanted wear" to "from wanted to wear".
This video from Smith College gives you a short explanation of how to find out if a citation from an AI chat is real.