ChatGPT is a robust language model with the ability to comprehend and generate human-like text. It can be used for many applications, including language translation, summarization, and text completion.
The rise of ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence (AI) models has made artificial intelligence more accessible to a wider public. The potential impact of generative AI is also currently being increasingly explored. But regardless of where or how this tool will evolve one thing is certain, to understand ChatGPT is to understand prompts! Prompts are the instructions that you enter into a large language model (LLM), such as ChatGPT, shaping the resulting output. When interacting with AI systems, it is crucial to understand how to design and refine your prompts to enhance the quality of the responses you receive. Prompt engineering is the technique used to refine prompts to obtain more desired outputs. This editorial aims to provide practical recommendations on how to improve prompting skills, and hence, to get the most out of their interactions with generative AI.
Get Your Answers in Tabular Form
ChatGPT can give you responses in the form of a table if you ask. This is particularly helpful for getting information or creative ideas. For example, you could tabulate meal ideas and ingredients, or game ideas and equipment, or the days of the week and how they're said in a few different languages.
Using follow-up prompts and natural language, you can have ChatGPT make changes to the tables it has drawn and even produce the tables in a standard format that can be understood by another program (such as Microsoft Excel).
Process Lists of Information
If you provide ChatGPT with a typed list of information, it can respond in a variety of ways. Maybe you want it to create anagrams from a list of names, or sort a list of products into alphabetical order, or turn all the items in a list into upper case. If needed, you can then click the copy icon (the small clipboard) at the end of an answer to have the processed text sent to the system clipboard.
Set Limits on the Answers You Get
ChatGPT can really impress when it's given restrictions to work within, so don't be shy when it comes to telling the bot to limit its responses to a certain number of words or a certain number of paragraphs.
It could be everything from condensing the information in four paragraphs down into one, or even asking for answers with words of seven characters or fewer (just to keep it simple). If ChatGPT doesn't follow your responses properly, you can correct it, and it'll try again.
Keep Your Audience in Mind
Another way of tweaking the way ChatGPT responds is to tell it who the intended audience is for its output. Complex subjects are explained to people with different levels of understanding. This works in a similar way.
For example, you can tell ChatGPT that you are speaking to a bunch of 10-year-olds or to an audience of business entrepreneurs and it will respond accordingly. It works well for generating multiple outputs along the same theme.
Produce Prompts for Other AI Engines
ChatGPT is a very capable prompt engineer itself. If you ask it to come up with creative and effective inputs for artificial intelligence engines such as Dall-E and Midjourney, you'll get text you can then input into other AI tools you're playing around with. You're even able to ask for tips with prompts for ChatGPT itself.
When it comes to generating prompts, the more detailed and specific you are about what you're looking for the better. You can get the chatbot to extend and add more detail to your sentences, you can get it to role-play as a prompt generator for a specific AI tool, and you can tell it to refine its answers as you add more and more information.
Copy and Paste Text From Other Sources
You don't have to do all the typing yourself when it comes to ChatGPT. Copy-and-paste is your friend, and there's no problem with pasting in text from other sources. While the input limit tops out at around 4,000 words, you can easily split the text you're sending the bot into several sections and get it to remember what you've previously sent.
Perhaps one of the best ways of using this approach is to get ChatGPT to simplify text that you don't understand—the explanation of a difficult scientific concept, for instance. You can also get it to translate text into different languages, write it in a more engaging or fluid style, and so on.
As generative AI will increasingly be used in all kinds of settings, workers should learn how to most effectively use generative AI and hence, will have to learn how to conduct and improve prompts. Some recommendations have been highlighted in this editorial, however below a step-by-step process is provided to help new users with their first prompting experiences.
Remember to include the following elements in your ChatGPT prompts and you’ll be on the right track:
[Your persona]
[Your knowledge]
[Your traits]
[Steps to the task]
[Your task]
[Goal]
[Format]
Hopefully, you have a better understanding of how to get better replies from ChatGPT now, using the above ChatGPT prompts and best practices.
Read more about about Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning.
Did you know?
Tacpoint offers Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning solutions, learn more by talking to one of our AI/ML experts.
