ChatGPT: The Ultimate AI Writing Buddy (If You Use It Right!)

Hey everyone, have you ever tried ChatGPT and felt like you just weren't getting the results you wanted? I know I have! But I recently discovered that there are some simple techniques for prompt engineering that can make your ChatGPT experience much more successful. In this article, I want to share with you the four techniques that have completely changed the way I use ChatGPT.?

Few Shot Standard Prompts

Let’s start with few shot standard prompts. This is where we include examples in our prompts to improve the results that we get. Instead of using a traditional standard prompt, which is just a generic prompt, we can use a few shot standard prompt which includes examples of the task that the prompt is trying to solve. This means that we have a higher chance of getting the desired result.

Here’s how the few shot standard prompt works:

- Task description

- Examples

- Prompt

For example, let's say we want to extract airport codes from the text “I want to fly from Orlando to Boston”. Here's what most people would use as their standard prompt:

Extract the airport codes from this text: “I want to fly from Orlando to Boston”

This prompt might work sometimes, but it's not reliable. The better way to improve your prompt is to include a few shot standard prompt. Here’s an example:

Extract the airport codes from this text:

- Text: “I want to fly from Los Angeles to Miami.”

?Airport codes: LAX, MIA

- Text: “I want to fly from Nashville to Kansas City.”

?Airport codes: BNA, MCI

- Text: “I want to fly from Orlando to Boston”

?Airport codes:

This prompt has three different examples, including the text we want to extract codes from. So, when we use ChatGPT, it will be easier for the AI to understand what we want, and give us the appropriate result.

Role Prompting

Sometimes, even when you’re using a good prompt, the default behavior of ChatGPT isn’t enough to get the results you want. This is where role prompting comes in. With role prompting, you can control ChatGPT’s behavior and get it to act in a certain way.

For example, let's say you want to practice for a job interview. You can tell ChatGPT to “act as hiring manager,” and it will behave accordingly. You can also use this technique to turn ChatGPT into a language tutor, a movie critic, or pretty much anything else.

All you need to do is start your prompt by saying “Act as a…” and then add as many details as possible. This technique is great for generating text for emails, blogs, stories, articles, and more.

Add Personality to Your Prompts and Generate Knowledge

In addition to few shot standard prompts and role prompting, you can also add personality to your prompts and generate knowledge. By adding a style and descriptors to your prompt, you can make your text stand out and get a specific tone or formality.

For example, say you want to write a blog post on how AI will replace human workers in the future. Instead of creating a standard prompt like “Write a 500-word blog post on how AI will replace humans,” you could try adding descriptors to make the prompt more interesting:

Write a witty 500-blog post on why AI will not replace humans. Write in the style of an expert in artificial intelligence with 10+ years of experience. Explain using funny examples.

After creating your prompt, you can also generate potentially useful information about your topic before generating a final response. This will make your post even more informative and helpful.?

Chain of Thought Prompting

The final technique I want to share with you today is chain of thought prompting. With this technique, you can induce the AI model to produce intermediate reasoning steps before giving a final answer to a problem. In other words, the AI will explain its reasoning instead of just giving you a simple answer.

This technique is effective in improving results on arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic reasoning tasks. By prompting ChatGPT with few-shot examples where the reasoning is explained, you can help the model understand the reasoning process behind the task at hand.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! I hope you've learned something new about how to use ChatGPT more effectively. Remember to use these four techniques: few shot standard prompts, role prompting, adding personality to your prompts, and chain of thought prompting.