About This Prompt
Prompts are your input into the AI system to obtain specific results. In other words, prompts are conversation starters: what and how you tell something to the AI for it to respond in a way that generates useful responses for you. After that, you can build a continuing prompt, and the AI will produce another response accordingly. It’s like having a conversation with another person, only in this case the conversation is text-based, and your interlocutor is AI. A prompt can be as simple as a phrase or as complex as multiple sentences and paragraphs. New models are even able to handle multimodal inputs, including pictures and audio. Despite the increased sophisticated of LLM chat-based interfaces, it’s still helpful to think of a generative AI tool like ChatGPT as “a machine you are programming with words” (Mollick, 2023). Your AI interactions and the output quality hinge largely on how you word your prompts.