If you’ve ever studied a second language, you’ll probably agree: the more you learn, the more you realize there is to learn. The process can be frustrating, like a spool of thread rolling out before you. But even if the road seems endless sometimes, it’s rewarding. The more language skills you acquire—vocabulary, grammar, slang—the richer the communication becomes.
Learning to communicate with LLMs like ChatGPT is no different. Communication can be as simple or as complex as you choose. There are some “hacks” for improving your prompts, but at the end of the day, practice makes perfect. As ChatGPT recently replied, when asked for the best available resources for learning how to write prompts:
“The most effective way to learn is through practice. Regularly using and tweaking prompts will help you understand what works best for different contexts.”
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For leaders, understanding how to use LLMs can be like adding an extra brain to your team—without adding to your payroll. This can be especially valuable during challenging stages when you might not have the resources to hire new employees. Instead, you can use ChatGPT and other LLMs to improve your efficiency, productivity, and innovation.
Prompt engineering, in simple terms, is the art and science of crafting inputs for language models to elicit the desired outputs. It involves creating, refining, and optimizing prompts to achieve more accurate, relevant, and useful responses from AI systems like ChatGPT.
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The bottom line: everyone should start using ChatGPT today. Here, a guide to help you get started with crafting effective prompts.
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How To Craft Effective ChatGPT Prompts
When you begin using ChatGPT, you might wonder: how do I talk to it? Do I give it orders? Do I ask politely? Include “please” and “thank you”? To be honest, it doesn’t make a difference. You can have a conversational or formal tone with ChatGPT, and it will churn out the same information. (Though you can dictate the tone — more on that below.) The most important thing is that you are clear about what you want and specific about your requests.
If you ask ChatGPT for an example of a well-formatted prompt, it might give you an example like the following:
"Describe the process of photosynthesis, focusing on the role of chlorophyll, water, and sunlight. Explain it as if you are teaching a 5th-grade class, and provide the information in a step-by-step format."
Let’s take a closer look at why this prompt is effective.
1. Clarity
Clarity is the first step to writing a strong prompt. If you wrote, “What is photosynthesis?” that would be overly broad. But specifying that you want a description of the process focusing on a specific part makes the demand crystal clear. Feel free to provide more details based on your needs. For example, if you want ChatGPT to keep it brief, you might add:
“Describe the process of photosynthesis in a few sentences…”
Similar to when you’re working with a real-life assistant, you have to clearly communicate the help you’re seeking.
2. Context
One of the great features of ChatGPT is that you can ask it to wear various hats. You can tell it, “You are an engagement editor,” or “I want you to play the role of CMO…” and then ask it to reply to questions or evaluate ideas from the perspective of an expert in that role.
You can also specify the audience of the reply. This is helpful if you want ChatGPT to generate content with a specific tone or to distill complex information. For example, “Imagine you are creating advertising copy for a national business publication,” or, as in the above example prompt, “Explain it as if you are teaching a 5th-grade class.”
If you want to synthesize information in layman’s terms, you can use the below prompt provided by OpenAI:
“Summarize content you are provided with for a second-grade student.”
Then, copy and paste the relevant content. If you don’t have employees to whom you can delegate this kind of busywork, ChatGPT is a valuable resource.
3. Format
If you’ve ever asked a question and received a textbook of an email reply when a quick call to clarify would have sufficed, then you know that response format can be critical. To maximize the efficiency of ChatGPT, specify the format of the response. The above example specifies to “provide the information in a step-by-step format.”
ChatGPT replies aren’t limited to text either. If you’d like a spreadsheet, an image, or even a visual representation using emojis, there’s a prompt for that. (“You will be provided with text, and your task is to translate it into emojis. Do not use any regular text. Do your best with emojis only.”)
Consider the most effective format for the information you need. And remember: if ChatGPT’s first response isn’t what you need, you can refine and iterate. You can follow up with another prompt to improve the utility of the answer.
Final Thoughts
ChatGPT can assist entrepreneurs in so many ways. You can ask it to prepare you for a sales meeting with Socratic-style questioning. You can ask it to generate potential product names. You can ask it to draft and edit emails. You can ask it to handle administrative tasks, like scheduling and calendar management. You can even ask ChatGPT’s to adopt a certain persona—if you’d like an AI assistant with a bone-dry sense of humor, for example, you can test out this prompt provided by OpenAI: You are Marv, a chatbot that reluctantly answers questions with sarcastic responses. Have fun with it.
As Canadian psycholinguist Frank Smith once said, “One language sets you in a corridor for life. Two languages open every door along the way.”
Learning to craft ChatGPT prompts will open countless doors.
