Painting With Words: The Future Field of Prompt Engineering
Things are moving fast. Faster than we can imagine. We’ve all seen the adoption curve of the iPhone taking four months to reach a million users, and ChatGPT taking just four days.
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Underneath the surface old business models are being challenged and entirely new industries are taking shape. There is even a novel class of knowledge worker being created: the Prompt Engineer.
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In a few weeks, we will simply be calling Prompt Engineering “PE,” and we will all know exactly what we are talking about. For now, we are learning about this field through exotic jobs listings that seek applicants for roles we never heard of.
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We probably wouldn’t pay much attention if it weren’t for the dollar signs – these things ($$$) always help us refine our career plans. Recently, I saw a listing that pays $65K with all the benefits. Another PE opening offered $365K if you had the skills to train a foundational model to deliver a digital persona. More about that later.
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Prompt Engineering is nothing new. It’s what humans have always done. Communication comes down to clearly painting a picture in someone else’s mind. It’s what philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein called “making pictures of facts.” When we do it well we get the desired response: people buy something from us, do something for us, or put us in office. (Wittgenstein also pointed out we get in a lot of arguments because we are crappy painters.)
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Prompt Engineering is the art of painting in the mind of AI. For people who can elegantly and efficiently extract fabulous responses from the machine there will always be plenty of well-paying jobs.
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Today, a massive new industry is forming that will use the base models of AI (i.e. ChatGPT) to launch a layer of AI advisors skilled in medicine, or relationships, or companionship. These AI advisors will be the face of many new billion-dollar companies. Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, the ChatGPT company, sees this in the very near future:
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“I think many of these trends we all made fun of were just too early. Like the chatbot thing was good, it was just too early. Now it can work. And I think having new medical services that are done through that, where you get great advice, or new education services like this, these are going to be very large companies.”
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Tom Wolfe wrote some fantastic books (The Right Stuff; The Bonfire of the Vanities), but maybe his best, and most overlooked, is The Painted Word, where he maps the path of abstract painting through the 20th century. Along the way we see art transform from something you hung on a gallery wall into theory that lived in someone’s head. Brush strokes slowly surrendered to high-brow hot air.
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Near the end of The Painted Word, Wolfe finds himself at The Richmond Art Center in Richmond, California. He encounters an artwork entitled Beautiful Toast Dream. It's from a new abstract upstart -- the school of invisible Conceptual Art. There is no canvas. No paint. Only description. Typewritten words on a page. “Art theory pure and simple, words on a page…” is how Wolfe summarized this culmination of post-modernism.
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Yet, in a strange twist of AI, all was not lost in Richmond, California. Words and theories still abound, but this time around they are being used to create art.
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Today Prompt Engineers are using words to paint in the mind of AI. With only a string of characters, accomplished PEs can extract smarter business plans, stronger visualizations, and surprising T2V (Text-to-video) outputs.
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Since the arrival of language we've been painting in other people’s minds. Our best word painters are some of our most legendary thinkers.
Picasso said every artwork took him a lifetime because he put his full experience into everything he did. The most successful Prompt Engineers will also draw on the richness of life to get the most out of their craft. To get a lot, you must give a lot.
It’s not hard to imagine a day when a high-functioning PE will be one of the broadest thinkers in any company. The person you go to for anything and everything. A great PE could be the most pivotal employee of all.
At the center of the next trillion-dollar business there might be a person whose resume looks a lot like that of a Prompt Engineer.
Teaching Advanced AI for Creativity: Top 100 2022 & 2024, Tech Philosopher, Designer, Poet, & A.I. Art Course Creator: Join 300k+ students at AdVenture Marketing Academy to 100X your human creativity.
2 年Rob Bagot I'm glad you've articulated this and put it out there because I agree entirely...
Director | Creative Director | Brand Storyteller at Swope Films
2 年This is probably how typesetters felt the first time they saw what Pagemaker could do. And what airbrush artists felt when they played with MacPaint back in the day. When I was a junior art director, I felt empowered looking at stock photo books. Many older creatives back then thought it was cheating. But to me they were inspirational tools to make my own vision more sellable to the agency and clients. Is graphic design, Photoshop or stock photography going away? Maybe, but better to grab the horns of this beast and ride.