Prompt Engineering: How an AI Training Method Became a Consumer Trend

Faithe J Day
Women in Technology
6 min readOct 4, 2024

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Photo by Jacob Mindak on Unsplash

Maybe it’s because of my profession or general interests, but I hear about prompt engineering everywhere I turn. When I first heard about it, I was excited. As someone who has spent the past year training artificial intelligence models on everything from image recognition to natural language processing, I assumed that the emphasis on prompts would focus on how engineers and developers improved their models.

However, that’s not what most people mean when discussing prompt engineering. Currently, prompt engineering is broadly understood as communicating with AI models to guide them toward the answer you want. While there are many different prompt engineering methods, most consumer-focused techniques prioritize providing information to the model about how to format and structure the prompt.

Consequently, I want to discuss how prompt engineering is being pitched to the public and how it differs from the process of training AI models. Additionally, I want to clarify why emphasizing prompt engineering can be counterproductive to the long-term…

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Faithe J Day
Women in Technology

Writer, Creator, and Educator. Millennial and Internet Expert. Learn more at https://fjday.com