Quick primer on prompting

Quite a few people who haven’t yet explored the new generative AI have asked me, “How do you use ChatGPT?” As a matter of fact, a recent article that I read quoted that about 75% of the people have not touched it.

That’s a surprising statistic.

But then, only about 38% of the adults have graduated from college (up from 30% back in 2011).

The following PDF is an attempt to persuade people to just explore ChatGPT or in my case, CoPilot, to get familiar with them. Those tools are designed to be easy to use; whether you get anything useful out of the tools is a different thing.

I do have my own take on the prompting. Most stress the need to give it context and enough details to enable the gen AI to supply what you need but for those who have not touched it, that suggestion can be a bit intimidating. It’s kind of like “You MUST DO THIS…” when all that is called for is exploring. So, I start off when a general prompt, just to see what it will give me.

Sometimes it can come back with something really interesting to explore. That exploration might be more productive that what you had originally intended. At the very least, I find that starting with the general preps the AI for what I’m going to be asking and it will start to pull together what it may have to go through. And sometimes its answers help clarify what I really am asking and thus I narrow down my ask.

Anyway, I’m just trying to encourage people to play with it because this technology could get better, and you would want to know what it is about.

Then once you input your general prompt, see what AI gives you and then probe further with giving it more context to maybe direct it in some direction. As one author says, you want to direct AI to give you information about bank as in banking industry or as in riverbanks. In my example, I wanted to focus on 2023 and just on Excel functions rather than entire universe of Microsoft. Microsoft includes stuff such as developer’s environment or Azure or other types of stuff that I do not currently use. Its answers gave me an idea on how to go about getting specific on what I really was looking for.

It is really just trial and error. Besides, one day it will give you one answer and then the next day it will give you something else. So far, these generative AI are rather inconsistent.

Later on, I will talk more about that.