Learning the skill of writing prompts for ChatGPT is highly valuable for harnessing the full potential of this AI-based software. The quality of ChatGPT’s responses significantly hinges on the clarity and precision of the inputs, which necessitate careful formulation. Crafting a prompt that is clear, specific, and well-crafted is crucial for attaining desired outcomes. Let’s explore the techniques for crafting ChatGPT prompts that yield satisfactory responses and generate useful content.
How does ChatGPT work?
ChatGPT is technically an LLM (large language model), a generative AI algorithm that uses deep learning techniques and large data sets to understand, synthesize, or generate content. In other words, it is an enhanced digital assistant that, through the use of artificial intelligence, provides a natural conversational experience.
Generative artificial intelligence is a branch that focuses on creating models that generate text, images, and other data (for example, programming code) on their own. ChatGPT uses supervised learning on a large amount of texts to generate content that, even read by us humans, is meaningful, and coherent, as if it were a text generated by a person.
ChatGPT has several possible applications, from the simplest to the most complex: grammatical correction, text summaries, translation into multiple languages or simplification of complex texts, code creation, creation of tables… ChatGPT is obviously not a search engine: The latter is designed to find information online based on keywords, whereas an LLM generates content and answers questions using natural language. This is why questions must be asked correctly.
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What can you do with ChatGPT?
The advantages of ChatGPT are many: it is accessible to everyone (free and with a very intuitive interface, but there is also a paid Plus version), easy to use even without knowing programming languages, always available, and can reduce costs by speeding up work. Furthermore, one of the most interesting aspects is that ChatGPT is also customisable: through prompt engineering techniques, this technology can adapt its responses to specific needs.
ChatGPT can successfully help in several areas:
- financial services, for example, to answer questions, give investment advice, or help you plan your finances;
- education /training, such as a virtual tutor who provides detailed explanations on topics, answers questions, creates interactive learning formulas and exercises on the most diverse topics;
- customer support, to automate and improve services by providing immediate answers to frequently asked questions and support in resolving technical problems;
- travel/hospitality planning with information on flights, hotels, restaurants and attractions;
- human resources/legal, with basic information on the laws, or to help with filling out standard forms;
- e-commerce or public services, to help the user complete his purchase or give quick information such as shipping costs;
- content marketing and content creation for anyone who uses the web to convey information, including of course the non-profit sector.
How to write prompts for ChatGPT
In any case, artificial intelligence will not prevent us from acquiring new skills. In fact, to make the most of ChatGPT, it is necessary to give ” the right instructions “, technically called prompts. Specific skills are therefore necessary: it is necessary to perfectly know the domain (for example legal field or medical field) and the content algorithm, to outline the most useful set and sequence of words to tell the machine what content to build.
Individuals known as prompt engineers are increasingly specialising in the development of skills geared towards providing specific instructions to AI for generating new code. Even within the same domain, content must be tailored differently. Consider the medical field; how much does the structure and vocabulary of a scientific article differ from that of a blog post? This is where algorithms come into play. Therefore, endeavours linked to generative AI demand dual mastery: proficiency in the application domain and the skill to craft effective prompts, along with the capability to verify the correctness of the output generated.
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What are ChatGPT prompts?
ChatGPT prompts are instructions or textual input that are given to the GPT language model to obtain responses or generate specific texts. When you interact with ChatGPT or other similar GPT models, you need to provide an initial prompt to communicate what you want to achieve as a result. The prompt can take different forms, depending on the specific context or use. For example, the prompt could be a question, a request for information, a description of a problem, or a request to generate text on a specific topic. The effectiveness of the prompt is critical to obtaining accurate and relevant responses from the model. You can experiment with different prompt wordings to get answers that best suit your needs.
How many types of prompts are there?
There is no precise number of prompt types for interacting with language models like ChatGPT, as prompts can vary depending on your needs and usage contexts. However, you can classify prompts into a few general categories:
- questions to get direct answers on a wide range of topics;
- requests for information or specific data and statistics on a topic;
- instructions or commands: for example, “Create a 200-word summary about climate change”;
- problem-solving: you can ask ChatGPT to help you in your work, for example by asking “How can I set up an effective fundraiser?”
- content generation: you can ask ChatGPT to write articles, stories, poems, and texts on specific topics, but also songs, jokes, fictional stories, names, and slogans;
- dialogue and conversation: you can start a conversation with ChatGPT;
- translation and questions related to grammar or language.
Tips on writing effective GPT Chat prompts
If we want to write great prompts for Chat GPT, here are some tips:
- get to the point straight away, avoiding overly long questions made up of too many words. At the same time, if your request is quite complex it may be useful to provide an explanatory introduction;
- use clear verbs and affirmative sentences: in spoken Italian, we often use formulas such as “don’t be rude!” instead of saying “Be polite”. Chat GPT prefers the second sentence;
- generally avoids any ambiguity ;
- if your request refers to the Italian context (or to a location), always specify it: it should not be taken for granted;
- define the role the machine will have, and give it an identity: will it have to act as a legal advisor? As a psychologist? An Engineer? Or other?
- describe the interlocutor: for example, you could tell ChatGPT that you want it to speak to teenagers, using their language and terminologies as much as possible;
- adapt the tone and format: do you want it to be conversational or produce a formal text? Trying to ChatGPT to produce a bullet point or oral argument for the court?
- try chained prompting; if you need to entrust ChatGPT with a complex task, you can use a trick, which is to divide the task into several sub-tasks. An example is sequential prompts, in which we don’t ask everything at once but ask more questions;
- provide examples with one-shot prompting: let’s give ChatGPT some example contents of the text/content we want to obtain;
- make several attempts: if the initial answer is not satisfactory, you can reformulate the prompt or provide additional details to get a better answer;
- remember that ChatGPT is updated to January 2022: for example, you cannot ask for information on laws that have just been approved by the current government. In general, be very careful about current issues. Chat GPT is not exactly a source of information.
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