Your quick and easy guide into prompting in AI

Gabrielle Ponce González
Effect Network
Published in
3 min readFeb 20, 2023

AI is the present and the future of business operations. Companies across various industries are adopting artificial intelligence in certain processes to enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and provide better customer experiences, and it’s working out pretty well. As AI adoption is significantly increasing, so is the need to refine and optimize its response, and prompting is the way to do that.

What is prompting?
The way humans communicate to AI to generate a response is by prompting. It’s essentially the instructions we give to the machine to generate what we want it to, or to have a sparring partner to think through an issue.
AI’s understand words differently than humans, and this is where finding the prompt that helps the AI perform at its best comes into play. You might consider a prompt engineer to be a translator between “human language” and “AI language,” where they will put your thoughts into terms the AI can understand. Nowadays, prompting is essentially the only skill needed to master these new, huge, and potent generative models.

Of course, it also helps to have some domain knowledge, to be able to identify when a generated response does not make sense. Occasionally, AI models can generate text that is deceivingly well versed, but does not correlate with reality.

Text prompting
Text prompting in AI refers to the process of providing suggestions or prompts to a user as they are entering text in an interface. The goal of text prompting in AI is to improve the accuracy and efficiency of the text input process by reducing the need for users to manually type out complete phrases or sentences.

There are several types of text prompting in AI, including:

  • Autocomplete: As a user begins to type, the AI system generates a list of potential completions for the text being entered. The user can then select one of the suggestions to complete the text.
  • Prediction: The AI system predicts what the user is trying to say based on the words they have already typed and offers suggestions for the next word or phrase.
  • Correction: The AI system identifies errors in the text being entered and offers suggestions for correcting the errors.

Text prompting in AI can be used in a variety of applications, including virtual assistants, chatbots, and text-based search engines. It can improve the user experience by reducing typing time and effort, as well as by helping users enter text more accurately.

Image prompting

Image prompting in AI refers to the process of generating textual descriptions or captions for images using Artificial Intelligence (AI) models. The goal of image captioning is to generate a concise and meaningful description of the content of an image, in the form of a sentence or a short paragraph.

This task is challenging because it requires a deep understanding of both image content and language. The AI model needs to recognize the objects, scenes, actions, and attributes present in the image and then generate appropriate words to describe them in a coherent and grammatical sentence.

There are several techniques used for image captioning, including template-based methods, retrieval-based methods, and machine learning-based methods. Machine learning-based methods, such as recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs), are currently the most popular approaches for image captioning. These models are trained on large datasets of images and captions to learn the relationships between image features and language. You can create these datasets through Effect Labeler: https://effectai.github.io/dApp-Label-Image/

Overall, prompting is a valuable technique for interacting with AI models and leveraging their capabilities to solve complex problems and generate high-quality outputs. With the continued advancement of AI technology and the development of more sophisticated models, prompting is likely to become an increasingly important tool for humans to interact with and control AI systems.

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