Generative AI for Academics

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Prompting AI

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4 responses to “Prompting AI”

  1. Jeroen Alessie avatar
    Jeroen Alessie

    Concerning Prompts that work well for me: I always end my prompt with ‘before you perform the task, please ask me 3 clarifying questions’. Most of the time it will ask questions which make the task more specific and more tailored towards what I really want. And most of the time the outcome will be much better.

    1. Michael Rowe avatar
      Michael Rowe

      Great suggestion. I also just remembered that asking the model to “think carefully, step by step” will result in better outcomes.

  2. Liezel Ennion avatar
    Liezel Ennion

    Thank you, I am a complete novice when it comes to AI, and this was very helpful. I did try to use AI a couple of times before, but approached it like a “google search” with limited results. The structured prompts worked much better than I expected it to.

    1. Michael Rowe avatar
      Michael Rowe

      Great to hear that you had a better experience using structured prompts. It’s not an intuitive approach that comes naturally, given our history with search engines that have trained us to reduce the complexity of our input to computers. Search engines ask that we remove complexity from the search context by stripping out all but the most important keywords. With generative AI, we need to add that complexity through the prompt.