Prompt-Writing Tips

How you write your prompts is a very important aspect of the quality of results that you get. Spend some time iterating the way you write prompts. We’ve also shared lots of links below that will help develop prompt writing skills.

1. Brainstorming Ideas / Articles:
   1. https://twitter.com/BrianRoemmele/status/1643032326652452864
   2. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/21/opinion/chatgpt-journalism.html
   3. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/25/technology/ai-chatbot-chatgpt-prompts.html
   4. https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/a-guide-to-prompting-ai-for-what
   5. https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/how-to-use-ai-to-do-practical-stuff
   6. https://prompts.chat/
   7. https://twitter.com/MushtaqBilalPhD/status/1621379333943083009
   8. https://twitter.com/MushtaqBilalPhD/status/1637715972705468417
   9. https://twitter.com/thatroblennon/status/1610316022174683136
   10. For Images:
       1. https://artificialcorner.com/youre-using-midjourney-wrong-here-s-how-to-create-better-images-than-99-of-midjourney-users-c876fbe7915e
       2. https://letsenhance.io/blog/article/ai-text-prompt-guide/
2. Suggested Tips:
   1. It performs better when you provide it info rather than ask it for info. This is a way to avoid hallucination problems. Try “Summarize the following text:” or “Explain the following text at an 8th grade reading level:” Consider using some complex academic article abstracts to test this.
      1. GPT3.5 cannot follow a URL to get information, but it will hallucinate content and appear that it can do so if the URL is descriptive enough. You can’t simply paste in a URL, you should paste the content directly in.
   2. Ask it to re-write text in different styles. “Rewrite this in the style of…”
   3. It tends to perform better when you assign it a role and give it a task and format. “Act as… to complete the task of … and maintain the format of…” Examples here.
      1. Act as a professor and write…
         1. Acting as a professor, your task is to design a syllabus for a class on data and society. Include a weekly reading list. Please use only real verifiable sources that are cited. The class should be appropriate for college freshmen.
      2. Act as a life coach…
      3. Act as a senior front-end developer
      4. Act as a nurse…
      5. Act as a travel agent…
   4. Ask it to generate text-to-image for other AI tools like Midjournay/DALL-E 2
   5. Create an interactive choose-your-own adventure game.
      1. “Create an interactive choose-your-own adventure game about Star Trek. I will play the role of the captain. You will prompt me with multiple choice options for what actions I will take, but also allow me to give my own answers that go beyond the choices.“
   6. Use a temperature setting between 0.1 and 1. 1 is more creative, more likely to hallucinate, more unpredictable. 0.1 is the most stable and confident result.
3. Iterative prompting
   1. We recently drafted a chapter for an edited collection about incorporating AI, and included a supplemental page with iterative prompting examples: http://www.jjsylvia.com/wicked-ai/
   2. If you have a very long prompt generation, you may need to type “continue” to have it finish the text generation.