How to ask AI questions?
Using AI Prompts
Every AI interaction starts with a prompt. These can from a simple question to a series of instructions and requirements, even including new information or data that must be passed to the AI to give the desired output. Whatever the complexity, it is essential that you use a well-crafted and carefully designed prompt to generate the required output, particularly when AI is being used within teaching activities or assessments.
This page provides guidance and links to resources that will help you gain confidence in writing prompts for AI. A link for the video can be found below:
What are Prompts?
Prompts are what we use to give information to the AI assistant, so it understands what we are asking it to provide. Making good prompts requires a lot of trial and error through “Prompt Engineering” i.e. looking at how to alter the prompt to get a good output.
To prompt an AI you don’t need to know machine language as you can ask it simple questions by using normal sentence structures.
So how does prompting help? The AI assistant tries to understand the request you enter in order to formulate an appropriate response; hence it is useful to give it some context, or parameters. You can ask it to produce an outcome in a specific style, language, or format.
Be aware that within co-pilot, the AI is aware of previous prompts and answers that it has given, so it can generate responses based on previous outputs. This means you can provide the AI with a further prompt that contains new information (i.e. more detail, asking for an amendment, setting additional boundaries) that helps to refine its next response. You can build on these responses, providing as many additional prompts as needed to achieve your desired output.
What structure can I use to help me with prompts?
There are numerous ways to frame your prompt, what they all have in common is the need to be well communicated, and descriptive. If you frame your prompt in the following way, it should go some way to providing a relevant response. However, whilst this is a good start, it’s worth noting that you may have to try a couple of times to get the output that you want and part of prompt engineering is working out the prompts that work for your needs.
Ask the tool to act in a particular persona. For example:
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- Project Manager
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- Designer
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- Accountant
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- Website developer
What action do you want the Ai to complete. For example:
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- A headline
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- An article
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- A summary page
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- A Blog
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- A Cover letter
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- A Lesson plan
Are there are limitations or elements you want to make sure are included or excluded from the reply. For example:
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- Use poetic language.
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- Use a formal tone.
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- Use 400 words or less.
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- Use approved research papers.
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- create it in a table format.
What would you like the output to look like? For example:
- Results in a table
- Summarised using headings
- summary of information
- bullet points
Creating prompts for image generation
Set the style
Create:
- Pencil drawing
- Specific artists style e.g. Van Gogh
- Digital Image
- Pixar animation style
Be as descriptive as you can:
“In the style of Van Gogh create me a painting of a cockerpoo wearing a bowler hat and smoking a pipe”, with the most important elements of the desired output upfront.