When it comes to AI-powered content generation, the magic starts with a simple yet crucial element: well structured and thought-out AI prompts. But if you look at what most people use as prompts, it tends to be a few lines of simple instructions, and the expectation is that they will get outstanding results. More often than not, what's generated is of little use.

In this digital age, AI prompts are the guiding stars for Artificial Intelligence tools, helping small businesses, solopreneurs, independent workers, and content creators craft compelling content faster and at less cost. Unfortunately, most people do not know how to communicate with or guide these tools.

Further down we will dig into what great prompts are composed of, so you can start using the framework to begin whipping up your own highly effective instructions.

But firstly let's look at what AI prompts are, and why should you care about them.

What are AI Prompts? ⚙️

You can visualize AI prompts as being the steering wheel of an AI-driven content car, guiding and piloting to reach a specific destination or outcome.

Prompt engineering which we hear about so much these days, is basically the way we communicate with AI, and the prompt is the input and instructions with the goal of a desired output or result. So, we as “AI Tool handlers” need to get better at communicating with our AI assistants/co-authors.

Up until now, we have predominantly been using text prompting to communicate with our AI tools, although recently Open AI has launched a new version of their service where you can speak and ChatGPT will convert the spoken word into text!   However, this development is still very new, so we will write about this soon, but for the purposes of this article, we will stick to typing text prompts.

💡

Prompt engineering is the skillset of talking to bots

 

Why Are AI Prompts Important? 🦾

AI prompts hold the key to unlocking the full potential of AI writing tools. They determine the direction, structure, tone, and style of your content, making them indispensable for controlling what you want generated by the AI tool.   Whether you're a blogger, marketer, or small business owner, using the right prompts can save you time and effort while ensuring the content generated meets your specific needs.

How Do You Construct Effective AI Prompts? 💻

Creating effective AI prompts is an art in itself. It's like composing a symphony where each note matters.

There are 3 major high-level building blocks in crafting a great prompt:

1. Language – this relates to the words we use in prompting. To get great output we need great input! Remember the old saying in computer science “Garbage in, Garbage out (GIGO).  The point is that we need to seriously study and string together effective commands to communicate with AI.
2. Models - AI looks at things in terms of models, concepts, and structures.  So, when prompting it is best to provide a structure or model for the AI tool so it can return a relevant output.

Let me give you a simple example of what I mean. When I ask my AI tool to help me with an article, I may prompt it by saying:

Use the keyword “AI writing tools”, and generate a 1300-word article. The title of the article should include the keyword “AI writing tools”. Write this title in such a way that it grabs the reader's attention and generates interest in them to want to read the article further. Include 5 subheadings. Under each sub-heading, each paragraph should be composed of 200 words. One of the subheadings should be titled “ 5 best AI tools for writing”. Under this sub-heading of “ 5 best AI tools for writing”,  name 5 of the most well-known AI writing tools available on the market. For each of these 5 tools, list the Pros and Cons.  Also, provide a short summary of what each AI tool can do. Lastly, include an overall article summary of 150 words at the end of the blog.

The above model provides a glimpse of what kind of simple boundary to set an AI tool when prompting so that the AI software will work within these parameters. The above is still a simple prompt/model, usually, I go even deeper and wider with my instructions.  

Open-ended AI tools such as Chat GPT, Bard, and Claude, have access to huge amounts of data, almost equivalent to an infinite brain, so in theory, they can output many variations of a given set of prompts. To avoid receiving an output not fit for purpose, we need to be very detailed and specific.

That is why we need to provide as much guidance as possible, and these instructions or models help the AI to think…..or a better term may be to compute (because they cannot think, well, not yet!! 🫣 ).

Read the remainder of the article here:  AI Tools tribe