It is very easy to jump into any AI tool and start using it right away. They are natural in a way that we can actually “talk” with the AI tools to get our desired results.
But as I wrote in my previous articles, even when we talk and describe things, there can be quite a big room for interpretation.
And while I am strongly against the term “prompt engineering”, there are ways to interact with AI tools better. And everyone’s next step in using your favorite AI tool is to get much more familiar with it and consciously improve the way you communicate your ideas and instructions.
Luckily those things that we can use for our better communication with AI are mostly common sense practices.
The very first way you can improve your “prompting” and make your life easier when iterating on your prompts is to avoid being messy. Bring some structure and order to your prompts.
Let’s explore an example:
You want your AI tool to help you with recipes for your meals. One way to interact with an AI is to just talk to it like you are chatting with a person and ask it for a recipe by telling it what you want to make.
Then you ask it to give you nutrition facts of the finished meal.
And that will be your way of telling AI to give you recipes for your meals. Very easy, nothing special here. You will get what you want without any issues.
…But there is a way to make your life much easier. Simply bring some order to that conversation.
Imagine you are giving a job to your assistant to come up with recipes for your desired meals.
Now it is a job and you want your recipes to have a certain structure so you don’t get lost in them.
Well, you give AI rules to follow so you always get your recipes and they will always follow the same structure.
Example:
I want a meal recipe for my favorite meals. Every time I give you a meal idea, I want the recipe to have the same structure.
The structure will be like this:
List all the ingredients necessary for the recipe.
Include necessary amounts for each ingredient (use measurements used in USA and in parenthesis use measurements used in Europe )
Append calories + macronutrients (protein, carbohydrates and fat in grams) for each ingredient
Then include calories + macronutrients (protein, carbohydrates and fat in grams) for the completed meal and for one portion
Then give me instructions for the meal preparation.
Do you understand the task?
→ Let’s assume we are now using ChatGpt. It will respond with a positive answer and ask you to provide a meal idea and it will follow the structure you laid out for each meal’s recipe you want ChatGpt to give you.
Now you have turned a “messy” chat with an AI to a structured workspace that gives you a structured recipe each time you prompt it.
It just required a little bit more work at the beginning, but from now on you will always get a recipe with the same structure.
It will also make it easier to go back and look at old recipes you prompted the AI since the entire chat now looks much more organized and is therefore easier to navigate.
Don’t try to be an engineer to be better at AI prompting. Think about how to be a better communicator and your AI experience will improve significantly.
