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REFERENCE POINTS
- And if you want to be reassured that you are following a deep historical trend – then always start with the Greeks. Yes, the Greeks understood the importance of asking the right questions, particularly through the teachings and practices of Socrates. Socratic questioning is an educational method that emphasizes the power of thoughtful questioning to discover answers and deepen understanding.
- And Peter Drucker has a lot to answer for in the old economy! A renowned management consultant, Drucker was the author of “The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization” (2008) and throughout all his work a pioneer of critical thinking in management and organizational development.
- Now fast forward to the new world of AI and what do you find? Asking the right question is in the front line and the job and role of the Prompt Engineer has never been more important. Knowing the right question to ask is the same as having the keys to the knowledge gateway: it’s invaluable for business.
LEVERAGING PROMPTS
In the early days of AI adoption (just a few months ago), becoming a Prompt Engineer for yourself seemed like a very good option. But the bar has been raised many times since then and third party solutions are now readily available to leverage without necessarily having to try to swim at the deep end on your own. Here’s a Summary of the Top 6:
TOP 6 PROMPT OPTIONS
| 1 | Learn Prompt Engineering for Yourself |
| 2 | Hire a Prompt Engineer |
| 3 | Explore the Lists of Practical Prompts |
| 4 | Leverage the New Prompt Libraries |
| 5 | Take advantage of the New Prompt Guides |
| 6 | Wait for the AI Prompt Assistant |
| 7 | Tools see below new… |
1. Learn for Yourself
Asking the Right Questions is part of our Human heritage and in the early days that skill alone was enough to start generating the right insights from LLM’s.
But like most things under development, it quickly becomes more complicated. For example, you have to know the difference between Chain of Thought (sequential questions) and Tree of Thought reasoning (inter-related questions). The former is okay to follow; the latter isn’t without a much bigger investment of your time.
2. Hire a Prompt Engineer
Recently, as you’d expect, there’s has been an upsurge in requests to find Prompt Engineers (e.g. Through Linked-In) and also in the bigger recruitment firms (e.g. Indeed) adding new requests as well as US firms now operating in the UK as well (e.g. Invedus); and there is a growing freelance market as well. (E.g. https://www.freelancer.co.uk/hire/prompt-engineering)
3. Take advantage of Expert Prompts
Every day in the Business Media across every continent there are articles featuring Expert generated Prompt Lists covering a huge range of practical problems. For example, one of the earliest ones I read was about 120 Ways to Use Prompts to improve Marketing. Since then the genre has been overloaded with new suggestions! (E.g. https://www.techopedia.com/120-best-chatgpt-prompts-for-marketing)
4. Start Exploring and Building Prompt Libraries
A Prompt Library is a library of high-quality prompts ready to be used to give instructions to generative AIs such as ChatGPT. It allows you to obtain the best results without having to start writing prompts from scratch for each request. Find out everything you need to know!
Generative AIs such as DALL-E, ChatGPT and MidJourney offer tremendous possibilities… as long as you know how to talk to them! These powerful tools are capable of generating images, text, audio or even computer code. All you have to do is ask them using a natural language query: the prompt. However, to create content that corresponds exactly to what is expected, it is often necessary to formulate the request in an extremely precise and detailed way. This can be tedious, and often requires you to try multiple iterations of the same prompt until you are satisfied. Generating a large quantity of elements can therefore quickly become a mammoth task. Fortunately, there are already complete collections of prompts already written for a wide variety of use cases, with the possibility of modifying them to meet specific needs: Prompt Libraries. (E.g. https://datascientest.com/en/prompt-library-what-is-an-ai-prompt-library-and-how-do-you-create-your-own)
5. Take advantage of the New Guides
Of course vendors want to sell their products and services! But there’s always a tipping point when the initial hype get turned into practical business reality. It’s usually easy to detect the best guides that identify the problems we are all facing and then provide the solutions. (E.g. https://www.promptingguide.ai/)
6. AI-powered Prompt and Personal Assistant
As you’d expect if you’ve been following the burgeoning AI media announcements, your AI Personal Assistant is on its way. But not yet. When they do arrive – as Google (Deep Mind) and Microsoft (OpenAI) are planning then these will be gamechangers for Prompt Engineering. (E.g. https://www.ft.com/content/8772d32b-99df-497f-9bd7-4244f38d0439)
7. AI Prompt Engineering Tools
And on top of everything else you can also choose from a range of prompt engineering tools to optimize your approach. Increasingly these will become more and more context sensitive and gain more traction in the marketplace as a simpler way for businesses to leverage AI. (E.g. https://www.eweek.com/artificial-intelligence/prompt-engineering-tools/)
END GAME
You probably already know the importance of asking the right question in the human world. This is even more important in the AI world but it’s more complex because you have to learn how to interrogate Language Models to drill down to the relevant answer. It’s fair to say this is sometimes more complex than it first appears and you may reach a point where you simply don’t have the time to proceed any further. The good news however is that there is plenty of vested interests to get you to where you want to be and these are becoming simpler and more powerful every week.
Ultimately, AI will do the Prompt work for you: in the meantime there are plenty of useful intermediate choices for you to leverage.
