The Dawn of Prompt Engineering

The pace of AI acceleration has surprised even its creators. It has evolved dramatically since Dr Geoffrey Hinton built a pioneering image analysis neural network in 2012.? Dr Hinton, widely seen as the godfather of artificial intelligence (AI) last week quit his job at Google, warning about the growing dangers from developments in the field. In a statement to the New York Times, he stated he now regretted his work and told the BBC some of the dangers of AI chatbots were "quite scary".

On the flip side of this, generative AI has begun to create huge opportunities for new roles, new ways of working and a new industry of whispering.

A whisperer is a person skilled in taming or training animals, typically using body language and gentle vocal persuasion. Today, we have a new kind of whisperer in the job market - the ‘AI whisperers’, also known as prompt engineers. They ‘whisper’ prompts into AI tools to train them and produce the most desirable outputs for their business/organisation. In more formal terms, a prompt engineer is a professional who specialises in developing, refining and optimising AI-generated text prompts to ensure they are accurate, engaging and relevant for various applications.?

Many norms have been broken with the advent of AI, one of the prominent ones being the belief that creativity is only unique to humans. Today, even a non-creative person can be creative with the assistance of AI. This might instil a considerable amount of fear in content writers, graphic designers and software engineers about losing their jobs to automation and AI. However, with the influx of roles like a prompt engineer, they can build the capability of “prompting” which allows them to integrate AI in their work and make room for peaceful coexistence. Prompt engineering doesn’t necessarily require you to be an AI expert or have a degree in computer science, in fact most prompt engineers have their background in history, philosophy or english according to Australian Financial Review.?

The next big question would be - Is the role of a prompt engineer lucrative? How much does a prompt engineer get paid? According to sources, being a prompt engineer can pay upwards of AUS$500,900 a year and appears to be a red-hot market that will attract the emerging workforce. These jobs also offer diversity across several domains such as Education, Legal Firms, Financial Consultancies and of course Technology!?

Two of the commonly used tools today for the prompt engineers to feed their prompts into are:

1)ChatGPT - the text-based AI tool has a wide range of applications from generating essays, jokes and poetry to charting out robust computer code and business plans. Prompts can be tinkered to produce better results. There is a common misconception that a conversational chat with AI tools provides good results, however, this might not be true. We might yield more targeted results using a single prompt but with adequate context and information. In this regard, The Conversation suggests few steps to sharpen your prompt writing skills, such as including information about:

• your desired focus, format, style, intended audience and text length
• a list of points you want addressed
• what perspective you want the text written from, if applicable
• and specific requirements, such as no jargon.

2) MidJourney - this is an art generation tool that takes text prompts and gives image outputs accordingly. It provides a range of parameters that we can set to produce better results such as:

• image qualities like “beautiful” or “high definition”
• objects you want pictured
• lighting and colours.
• It also provides a plethora of specific commands for different features such as –ar for aspect ratio, –c to produce more “unusual” results with a progressive scale from 0 to 100, and so on.??

In addition to the above tools, there are several emerging online courses that cater to gaining proficiency with AI tools. Educational Institutions such as the University of Sydney Business School even have a dedicated course on “AI fluency”.?

Tools like ChatGPT and MidJourney have undoubtedly revolutionised the content creation and automation sectors, however, apprehensions persist in a few areas such as:

1. The intellectual property rights of the content created by AI
2. The tendency of AI to produce unreliable and inaccurate results
3. Security and Privacy concerns around sensitive data
4. Job security and unemployment
5. Relevance of jobs such as prompt engineers, which may become obsolete with AI softwares becoming more and more independent

At this juncture, when we juxtapose the pros against the cons, we may foresee three possible futures as stated by Harvard Business Review:

1.The Monopoly of the Machines: Organisations choose to invest in AI to save on labour cost and this leads to machines completely taking over various sectors with no or minimal human intervention.?

2. “Human-made” commands a premium: The industrial revolution in the 18th century revolutionised many sectors, particularly the textile sector which put the handmade cotton goods out of business and replaced it with machine-made goods. However, years later, handicrafts re-emerged and are today more expensive and valuable due to their “authentic” factor. Similarly with AI, history might repeat, with many people opposing the supremacy of AI, thereby leading to a demand for authentic ‘human’ work, akin to handicrafts today.?

3. An explosion of AI-assisted Innovation: A third likely possibility is the emergence of jobs that coexist with AI, such as that of the prompt engineer. This might combine the computational abilities of the machine with the logical and critical thinking abilities of the human mind.?

Which future do you envision for your Organisation? At JOST&Co, we can help your Organisation design job roles around AI. Contact us at 1300 791 950? - we’d love to hear from you.?

Reference Articles:

• Australian Financial Review ‘$500,900 pay for ‘AI whisperer’ jobs appears in red-hot market’ (https://bit.ly/44Jxpo8)
• The Conversation, ‘How to perfect your prompt writing skills for AI generators’, (https://bit.ly/3pke2C6)
• Harvard Business Review, ‘How Generative AI could disrupt Creative Work’ (https://bit.ly/41mvTp4)
• AI 'godfather' Geoffrey Hinton warns of dangers as he quits Google (https://bit.ly/3NXuzWz)