Automating Tools for Prompt Engineering

Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) started making waves a few years ago with the release of systems such as ChatGPT and DALL-E. They are able to produce sophisticated and human-like text, code, or images after the models powering them are trained on large quantities of data. However, it soon became apparent that the specific phrasing of a question or statement input by a user, known as a prompt, had an impact on the quality of the resulting output. "It's a way of unlocking different capabilities from these models," says Andrei Muresanu, an AI researcher at Vector Institute in Toronto, Canada. "If you tell ChatGPT to pretend that it's a professor of mathematics, it will do better on math questions than if you just say, 'answer this question' or'pretend you're a student'." Coming up with prompts that steer a model towards a desired output has emerged as a relatively new profession, called prompt engineering, to help achieve more relevant and accurate results.