The Art of Prompt Engineering: Get What You Need From ChatGPT

Posted on July 9, 2024 | Updated on July 26, 2024

Prompt engineering has become increasingly vital with the rise of AI and conversational agents as they optimize interactions with these advanced systems. The evolution of AI — with breakthroughs in machine learning and natural language processing — has enabled machines to understand and respond to human language more accurately than before.

This transformation has made tools likeChatGPT indispensable across various domains, from enhancing customer service to assisting with creative tasks. However, the true potential of these AI systems is unlocked through well-crafted prompts. Clear, specific, contextually-rich prompts ensure that AI can provide accurate and relevant responses, making interactions more efficient and effective.

What Is Prompt Engineering?

Prompt engineering involves designing and refining input queries to elicit the most accurate and relevant responses from AI systems, particularly large language models (LLMs). This practice is essential because it significantly enhances LLMs’ capacity to perform various tasks.

While generative AI has the ability to provide accurate, precise and useful results, its challenges in understanding users’ goals stand in the way. Prompt engineering is a way to overcome that obstacle.

This practice is relatively new but is catching on quickly. Roughly 7% of AI adopters have already hired people specifically to engineer generative AI prompts. You may not need an entire role dedicated to this strategy, but it should play a role in your AI usage. Learning to engineer more effective prompts can make generative AI a much more cost-effective tool.

This roster includes straightforward question answering to more complex arithmetic reasoning. By carefully crafting prompts, users can guide AI to understand better and respond to their queries. This habit maximizes the utility of the technology across various applications.

The influence of prompts on AI responses is essential. Poorly crafted prompts often lead to vague, irrelevant or incorrect answers. Meanwhile, well-crafted questions result in precise, contextually appropriate and valuable outputs.

For example, a vague prompt like “Tell me about dogs” might yield a broad and unspecific response. A more specific prompt, like “Explain the behavioral traits of Golden Retrievers and how they differ from German Shepherds,” will generate a more detailed and relevant answer. Effective prompt engineering ensures users utilize AI systems to their full potential. This practice also provides clear, accurate, actionable information tailored to users’ needs.

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Benefits of Prompt Engineering

The most obvious benefit of prompt engineering is that it makes it easier to get what you want from an AI model. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT can boost employee productivity and improve decision-making, but only if workers use them efficiently. These solutions quickly hit a point of diminishing returns if users must repeatedly ask new questions to get the answers they need.

A well-engineered prompt gives users an accurate, relevant and properly formatted response with fewer inputs. Consequently, the efficiency and data analysis benefits of AI become more impactful.

This practice can also improve the AI training and optimization process. Prompt engineers can learn about an AI’s knowledge gaps or other inefficiencies through their interactions with them. They can then refine the model or design prompt templates to overcome these barriers, leading to a more reliable AI solution.

Elements of Effective Prompts

Effective prompt engineering is crucial for eliciting high-quality responses from AI systems. Key elements include:

  • Clarity: Using clear and concise language helps the AI understand the request without ambiguity.
  • Specificity: Providing detailed information ensures the AI can generate precise and relevant answers.
  • Context: Giving background information or context shapes the AI’s understanding and response.
  • Relevance: Keeping the prompt focused on the desired outcome avoids unnecessary or off-topic responses.
  • Format: Specifying the desired format, such as a list or a paragraph, guides the AI in structuring its response accordingly.

These elements make prompts more effective and ensure AI responses are accurate, relevant and valuable.

Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

Crafting effective prompts involves more than understanding key elements. It also requires awareness of common pitfalls that can undermine AI responses. Recognizing and addressing these issues allows users to enhance the accuracy and relevance of the generated information.

Leading Questions

Leading questions can bias AI responses by encouraging or guiding the model toward a desired answer. They often frame the query in a way that confirms preconceived notions. For instance, asking, “Isn’t renewable energy the best solution to climate change?” prompts the AI to agree with the statement rather than provide an unbiased response.

To avoid this, users should frame questions neutrally, such as, “What are the benefits and drawbacks of renewable energy in addressing climate change?” This approach allows the AI to generate a balanced and informative response, free from the influence of any biased framing.

Ambiguous Language

Precision in prompts is crucial because it ensures AI responses are accurate and relevant. It avoids the confusion that often arises from vague terms. When prompts are imprecise or ambiguous, the AI may struggle to understand the user’s intent, leading to generalized or off-topic answers.

For example, a “Discuss benefits” prompt is too vague and can result in an unfocused response. Instead, specifying “Discuss the economic benefits of solar energy for residential households” directs the AI to provide detailed and pertinent information. Being precise and avoiding vague terms can enhance the clarity and usefulness of AI-generated content.

Advanced Prompt Engineering Techniques

Once users have mastered the basics of crafting effective prompts, they can explore advanced techniques to refine and optimize their interactions with AI. These strategies help unlock even greater potential to enable more complex and nuanced responses from the AI system.

Leverage Temperature and Max Tokens

Adjusting settings such as temperature and max tokens can significantly influence an AI’s output’s response length and creativity. Temperature controls the randomness of the responses. For example, a lower temperature results in more focused and deterministic answers. Meanwhile, a higher temperature allows more creative and varied responses.

On the other hand, max tokens limit the response length, ensuring the AI provides concise or detailed answers based on the user’s needs. For instance, setting a lower max tokens value will generate a brief response suitable for straightforward queries. Conversely, a higher value will produce a more extensive and in-depth answer.

Few-Shot Prompting

One of the most basic prompt engineering techniques is few-shot prompting. Most users — at least casual AI users — use “zero-shot” prompting when interacting with these bots, meaning they ask a question with no examples. The few-shot technique provides demonstrations to improve the results.

These “shots” can mean defining a key term, providing an example answer format, stating a relevant fact or any other form of context. Whatever the specifics, studies show that few-shot prompting consistently improves generative AI accuracy in almost all types of tasks. The more complex a question is, the bigger this improvement will be.

Chain-of-Thought Prompting

More complex AI tasks may require chain-of-thought prompting. In this strategy, users break a complicated question into a series of smaller, related steps. That way, the model can perform detailed, logical analysis with less risk of getting confused or missing key parts of the prompt. This process reflects how humans typically handle tasks.

At its simplest, chain-of-thought prompting involves adding a qualifier like “explain your answer step by step” to a prompt. However, some engineers prefer to offer an example of questions and the logical step-by-step process that leads to correct answers. This approach may take more time but can produce more accurate results.

Tree-of-Thought Prompting

Tree-of-thought prompt engineering goes a step further. After asking a question, the user then tells the model to list several possible next steps and elaborate on each. The result is a combination of several chain-of-thought responses, providing comprehensive coverage on a topic.

In addition to offering more context and explanation than a chain-of-thought prompt, tree-of-thought prompting can be more accurate. Similarities and trends between thoughts in different step-by-step iterations show more confidence in those facts being accurate, for example. This approach has let some models solve problems with 74% accuracy when chain-of-thought prompting could only reach 4% accuracy.

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Maieutic Prompting

A more streamlined way to explore a generative model’s reasoning is to us Maieutic prompting. This method involves asking the AI solution how it arrived at its answer. Users may then expand further, asking it to explains parts of the initial explanation.

Maieutic prompting involves more back-and-forth conversation with an AI model than tree-of-thought prompting but each prompt is shorter, so it takes less time to write. This approach also lets you hone in on specific areas you’re curious about or want more visibility into. As users employe Maieutic prompting more often, the model also learns to adapt its initial responses to provide more of what users are looking for. 

Self-Refine Prompting

Self-refine prompting is another helpful prompt engineering technique when you want the best possible response in minimal time. Here, you ask a question, then tell the AI model to critique its own response and answer the query again in light of those criticisms.

A model could critique its initial response for being too general or not including actionable examples. Then, in the follow-up, it would offer a more specific and actionable answer. You can repeat the self-refine process as many times as you want to achieve an outcome you’re happy with.

Chaining Prompts for Complex Queries

Breaking down complex requests into simple, sequential prompts is a highly effective strategy for interacting with AI. It maintains context, enhances user experience and reduces ambiguity. Dividing a multifaceted query into smaller, manageable parts allows users to guide the AI through each process step.

This approach is similar to Maieutic and chain-of-thought prompting in that involves related steps and an ongoing conversation with bots. Instead of asking for more details, though, you ask a question, then ask a follow-up based on that response, repeating this process until you have all the information you want. This ensures the AI comprehends and addresses each aspect accurately.

For instance, instead of asking, “Explain the process of starting a business,” users can first prompt, “What are the initial steps to start a business?” followed by, “How do you secure funding for a new business?” and so on. This systematic approach keeps the AI focused and contextual, leading to precise, more coherent responses and smoother overall interaction.

Prompt chaining is ideal for tasks where you’re unsure of what exactly you want from your AI model. It’s also relatively easy to implement. This ease of use is important in light of how 48% of tech leaders say a lack of AI talent is their largest obstacle to deploying this technology.

Practical Applications and Examples

Understanding the principles of prompt engineering is only the beginning. Seeing these techniques in action highlights their value. Here are practical applications and examples for users to appreciate how effective prompts can enhance AI performance.

Business Use Cases

Crafting prompts for marketing, customer service and data analysis showcases the versatility and efficiency of generative AI. In marketing, precise prompts can generate tailored content to create personalized campaigns that resonate with specific audiences and drive engagement.

For customer service, well-crafted prompts enable AI to respond quickly and accurately to common inquiries. This improves customer satisfaction and frees up human agents for more complex tasks. In data analysis, detailed prompts guide AI to sift through vast data sets, identify trends and generate insightful reports, speeding up productivity.

Personal Use Cases

Effective prompt engineering with ChatGPT can be a game-changer for daily planning, creative writing and general inquiries. In daily planning, users can craft specific prompts to generate organized to-do lists, schedule reminders and suggest time management strategies.

Regarding general inquiries, clear and precise prompts ensure ChatGPT delivers accurate and relevant information, whether for learning new facts, exploring hobbies or solving everyday problems. 

Prompt Engineering Best Practices

Regardless of what prompt engineering technique you choose, you should keep a few best practices in mind. First, recognize that the ideal prompting approach depends on the task at hand. Just as Google Bard is better for marketers while ChatGPT is more consumer-friendly, different engineering strategies suit varying use cases.

You can find the optimal technique by recognizing each method’s strengths and weaknesses. Tree-of-though prompting is highly accurate but time-consuming. Prompt chaining requires minimal experience but can sometimes lead to conversations going in circles. Consider your specific query, goals and chatbot to determine the optimal path forward.

After selecting a prompt engineering technique, remember to be as specific as possible. The more room you leave for interpretation, the less likely an AI solution is to deliver ideal results. At the same time, avoid providing too much context or asking for too many steps at once. An information overload may confuse the model and limit its accuracy.

As you employ prompt engineering, you’ll discover input formats that typically work well for your processes. Save templates of these queries for teams to deploy in the future. This will save time in future AI workflows, which is particularly crucial for the 74% of business executives who expect AI to improve efficiency.

Future of Prompt Engineering

The evolving capabilities of AI and the critical role of prompt engineering shape the future of technology usage. Over 250 million users employed AI tools in 2023 — a number experts project to exceed 729 million by 2030. This rapid growth underscores the increasing reliance on AI across various sectors, highlighting the potential for automation and the development of specialized tools to assist in crafting effective prompts.

Mastering Prompt Engineering for Enhanced AI Interaction

Practicing and refining prompt-crafting skills is essential for anyone looking to maximize the potential of AI interactions. Mastering the art of prompt engineering enhances the accuracy and relevance of AI responses. It empowers users to leverage AI technology more effectively across various applications.

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About The Author

Coraline (Cora) Steiner is the Senior Editor of Designerly Magazine, as well as a freelance developer. Coraline particularly enjoys discussing the tech side of design, including IoT and web hosting topics. In her free time, Coraline enjoys creating digital art and is an amateur photographer.

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