WTF is prompt engineering?

By Hailey Mensik • May 19, 2023 •

Ivy Liu

This article is a WTF explainer, in which we break down media and marketing’s most confusing terms. More from the series →

This story was first published by Digiday sibling WorkLife

Generative artificial intelligence has the potential to completely transform the future of work, some experts say, but the newly-introduced tools are still far from perfect.

Language models like ChatGPT — which uses algorithms to process large amounts of data before spitting out an answer to prompted questions — is prone to hallucinating, or giving irrelevant and incorrect responses.

As more companies integrate AI into daily workflows, they’re realizing that using the tools correctly to get the right answers is still tricky. Enter prompt engineering.

Who exactly are prompt engineers?

Prompt engineers are people who know exactly what questions to ask AI platforms to get the answer they want.

Prompting AI with specific, detailed questions is key to generating factual, coherent results and making the best use of the new technology.

“Remember how it took us a little while to figure out what to put into Google to get out of it?” said Aaron Kwittken, founder and CEO of PRophet, a generative AI software-as-a-service platform.

“It’s kind of like computing words, not numbers,” Kwittken said.

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