Overview

Listing of best practices for creating Generative AI prompts:

• Don’t be ambiguous: Avoid using ambiguous language in your prompts as it can lead to unexpected results. Be clear, concise, and specific in your language.

• Using natural language, we should create prompts in a natural and conversational tone that mimic how you would ask or instruct a human, making the interaction more intuitive.

• Provide details: Large language models (LLMs) don’t have any background knowledge or context, so it’s crucial to provide as much information as possible in your prompts.

• Don’t use sensitive information: be mindful of sharing private or sensitive information when using AI tools. Depending on the tool, your prompts and responses may be recorded and used as training data to help fine-tune the model.

• Understand model limitations, be aware of the capabilities and limitations of the AI model you're working with and tailor prompts to align with the model's strengths and weaknesses

• Test and Iterate, we should test our prompts through iteration to refine and improve their effectiveness, analyze responses, and adjust prompts for improved outcomes.

• Reference help guides: Different tools operate by different rules, and there are many factors that can influence a model’s output, including its training data, set parameters, and content type. Reference help guides to ensure you’re using the tool correctly.

• Keep it simple and direct: The straighter the instruction, the better. Be clear, concise, and direct in your prompts.

• Set the context and background information: Context is key when it comes to writing effective AI prompts. Providing detailed instructions, context, and examples can help ensure the program produces the desired output.

• Use complete sentences: Frame your prompts as complete sentences rather than fragments or keywords. This helps the AI engine better comprehend the input and generate more coherent responses.

• Avoid leading or biased language: Ensure that your prompts are neutral and unbiased to prevent the AI engine from generating biased or unfair responses.

• Experiment with different phrasing and formatting: Try rephrasing your prompts in various ways to explore different angles or perspectives. This can help uncover new insights or generate diverse responses.

• Incorporate examples: Include specific examples or scenarios in your prompts to guide the AI engine's understanding and encourage more accurate and relevant responses.

• Balance specificity and generality: Find a balance between providing enough specific details in your prompts while still allowing room for the AI engine to generate creative and novel responses.

Benefits

Creating effective AI prompts is essential for maximizing the performance and accuracy of AI models. Some benefits of following best practices for creating AI prompts include:

• Improved model performance: Well-crafted prompts can significantly enhance the performance of AI models. By selecting the right words, phrases, symbols, and formats, prompt engineering can optimize the results obtained from AI models.

• Adaptability to model improvements: regularly updating and refining prompts allows us to adapt to improvements in AI models. As models evolve, effective prompts can take advantage of enhanced capabilities.

• Innovation and creation: Creative prompts can stimulate the generation of novel ideas, concepts and responses from the chatbot. This is particularly relevant in applications involving content creation, brainstorming, or artistic expression.

• Bias mitigation: Carefully crafted prompts help to reduce the risk of bias in AI responses, and avoiding biased language or assumptions in our prompts contributes to fairer outcomes.

• Enhanced communication: AI prompts serve as the bridge between human intent and machine understanding. They enable us to effectively communicate our desires and queries to generative AI models. By using clear and specific prompts, users can convey their intentions more accurately.

• Increased accuracy and relevance: Effective prompts help AI models generate more accurate and relevant outputs. By providing context and being specific in the prompts, users can guide the AI models to produce desired results with greater precision.

• Time and resource efficiency: Well-designed prompts can save time and resources by minimizing the need for manual intervention or post-processing of AI-generated outputs. When prompts are carefully crafted, the AI models are more likely to generate satisfactory results without requiring additional modifications.

• Facilitation of in-context learning: Prompts can be designed to include examples of queries and desired outputs, allowing AI models to learn in-context. This approach can improve the model's ability to understand and perform specific tasks, leading to better overall performance.

Use Best Practices

Below is a sample of how better prompting can yield better responses from our AI. The lesson here is simple: Better context and tasking better prompting better results. See the improvement in the answers provided based on improved prompts below.