Prompt engineering is a technique in the field of AI that involves
crafting specific instructions or queries to guide an AI system in
generating responses or creative content. It is the process of
creating effective prompts that enable AI models to generate
responses based on given inputs. Prompt engineering enables
direct interaction with the Language Model (LM) using only plain
language prompts.
Prompt engineering is critical in the world of AI as it allows models
to generate more accurate and relevant outputs. By creating
precise and comprehensive prompts, engineers can train AI
models to better understand the task they are performing and
generate responses that are more useful to humans.
Prompt engineering for creative work is a relatively new field that
has emerged with the development of generative AI systems.
These systems are capable of creating fresh data from existing
ones, and can be trained to produce high-quality content based on
given inputs or “prompts.
There are several types of prompts that can be used in prompt engineering:
• Direct prompting (Zero-shot) also known as Zero-shot, is the simplest type of prompt. It provides no examples to the model, just the instruction. You can also phrase the instruction as a question, or give the model a “role”.
• Prompting with examples (One-, few-, and multi-shot),involves providing specific, varied examples to help the model narrow its focus and generate more accurate results.
• Chain-of-thought prompting involves breaking down complex tasks into a sequence of simpler prompts.
• Zero-shot CoT is a combination of zero-shot and chain-ofthought prompting.