3 Prompting skills

A image generation website. On the left is a box which says ‘Enter your prompt’. The prompt says: Create a cute girl with blue hair and pink headphones in a street background in an anime style. On the right is the picture of the girl.

Prompting is the term used when we control a Generative AI by giving it instructions – the prompts to undertake a task. Prompts can be as short as a single sentence or can run to several pages of detailed instructions.

Prompting a GenAI tool is different from the types of searches you may be used to doing in an internet search engine. In this section, we look at how to prompt well using a single prompt, and whether a shorter or longer prompt is useful.

Watch this video, in which Harry Clark, from Mishcon de Reya, details how prompting ChatGPT is different to using a search engine.

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HARRY CLARK
I think first and foremost, the main hurdle that I had to try and get people to come over when they were presented with, say, a ChatGPT or other AI tool, and they hadn't really kind of used or understood any sort of generative AI service before, was trying to kind of pull them away from looking at this technology as a search engine as their frame of reference.
So if you think about, for example, ChatGPT. When you boot it up, its UI, its interface, looks a lot like a search engine in some ways. It's got this big appeasing search bar where you type in a query. And so naturally when people first boot up these services, they try to use it a bit like a search engine.
So rather than saying, for example, you know, ‘generate a comprehensive history of the French Revolution, including details on all of these leaders and therefore present it in this memory format with bullets and headings, etcetera’, which is, you know, akin to what you might do for a typical prompt for a research task like that, they might just say ‘French Revolution details’ and hit enter.
And obviously the the issue with that is, is that the less information that you give to, say, you know, a ChatGPT service upfront, the more it kind of has to either infer what it thinks that you want it to produce as an output and/or just simply extrapolate and potentially have more risk of getting something wrong or not to the sort of ideal endpoint you're getting to.
That's because right now, a lot of these services require a fair bit of heavy lifting from the user in order to get them to output something in the format that you need. You know, more so than you would do, for example, if you're using, say, I don't know, a Word document, where for the most part you can just go in there, type it in and get a document to look pretty much how you want.
Conversely, trying to describe to ChatGPT what a brief article looks like on a subject matter, development for example, could be interpreted in a lot of different ways, in the same way that if you asked, you know, one associate to write an article on development and then asked about a hundred others, you'd get a very wide-ranging sense of outputs in terms of length/structure/tone/style, if that was the only instruction you gave them.
So trying to tell people to give more detailed contextual inputs, trying to pry them away from thinking about these technologies as search engines in terms of their frame of reference for how they're used to doing things in their current way of work now, and getting them to really kind of consider every single component of what goes into completing a task, and how they kind of want the output to look at the end of it and breaking that down in a descriptive manner as best they can.
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Watch the video below in which Liz Hardie explores the difference between a simple one sentence prompt (prompt 1), and one which contains more direction for the GenAI to follow (prompt 2).

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LIZ HARDIE
I’m using ChatGPT 4.5 and my first prompt is going to be: write a poem.
And the response is: Here's a poem for you: Echoes in the Wind. In whispers soft, the wind does speak, Through fields of gold, past mountain’s peak. Carrying dreams on silken breeze, dancing lightly through the trees. Stars above begin their glow, mirroring hearts that ebb and flow. Secrets woven into night, stories told by pale moonlight. Gentle rivers softly sigh, reflecting worlds within the sky. Moments pass, yet linger near, memories held forever clear. Time moves on, yet moments stay, echoes guiding us our way. Listen closely, you will find, life’s sweetest truths within the wind.
Prompt 2. And my second prompt is: Write a poem about speed, it should make references to train journeys, car races and galloping horses and other similar fast events and objects. The audience for the poem will be 10–14-year-olds, English speakers, living in a big city. The poem should contain four verses and have a strong rhythm. The Speed of Dreams. Zooming past, the city lights, racing cars through neon nights, engines roar, the tires spin, who will lose, and who will win? Round the corner, chase the thrill, speeding faster, faster still. Clacking tracks beneath my feet, trains that thunder, swift and fleet, cities flash, they disappear, faster journeys every year. Stations blur, we’re on our way, speeding through the night and day. Hear the hoofbeats, feel the ground, galloping horses race around, manes like fire, eyes aflame, charging forward, wild and tame. Leaping fences, brave and bold, stories racing to be told. Skateboards glide and rockets blast, lightning strikes, so fierce and fast, planes above in endless flight, zooming swiftly out of sight. Keep the pace, embrace the ride, speed is freedom, speed is pride!
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If you want to read the prompts in order to try it out yourself, please go to a copy of the prompts and poems [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .

 

The first prompt was simplistic and did not contain any specific guidance on content. The second prompt was more nuanced and included much more detail about the information which should be included in the poem.

Activity icon Try an LLM

Timing: Allow 5 minutes

Why don’t you try it? Open an LLM – at the time of writing ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Llama all offer free versions.

Write a prompt asking for a poem, but make sure that you choose the topic, length and style of the poem. Include some additional guidance about the way the poem should develop, the audience, or what not to include. (Don’t give the GenAI tool any personal or confidential information.)

Record your prompt in the box below (you will need to refer back to it later in the course).

What did you think of the poem it produced?

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Discussion

We decided to ask the GenAI tool to write a similar poem to prompt 2 above, but in a different style. As we had already given the tool the detailed prompt, we asked it a third prompt: Do the same but the audience are music students learning about song writing. The poem should be in the style of a love ballad.

Response: Chasing Love at Full Speed

Like a train on the tracks, you pulled me near,

A rush in my heart, the way you appear.

Through the city lights, we glide and we race,

Every moment with you, I can't keep pace.

 

Your eyes are the engine, driving me wild,

In the fast lane of love, I’m your faithful child.

Like galloping horses, we soar and we glide,

In the rhythm of love, we’re lost in the ride.

 

In the speed of your touch, I can feel every beat,

Like a car in the night, racing down every street.

With you, time’s a blur, it’s just you and I,

Like the wind in my hair, we’re soaring so high.

 

We’re a song that’s unfolding, no need for a plan,

A melody flowing, just you and your man.

In this fast world, I’ll always chase you down,

Together, in love, we’ll always wear the crown.

The more specific the task you want completed, the more information your prompt needs to contain. That’s very similar to human exchanges – it is a little like asking for information from an assistant.

An illustration of an inefficient conversation between a manager and their assistant.
An inefficient office exchange
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Manager: ‘Please get me a copy of the quarterly reports.’

The assistant returns 3 hours later with 36 folders each containing about 6 pages.

Assistant: ‘Here are the reports you wanted.’

Manager: ‘Erm, what are they?’

Assistant: ‘These are all the quarterly reports I could find – I thought putting them in folders would make it easier to find specific reports.

Manager: ‘But I only wanted the most recent quarterly reports – Q2 this year.’

The assistant takes the top folder from the stack and tries to hand it over.

Manager: ‘Could you email those to me, I want to edit them and send them to the production team.’

An inefficient office exchange

The initial request was under-specified – not all the required information was given, and there was no indication of how the result was to be used. With a little thought, the task could have been described much more specifically.

An illustration of the ideal prompt from manager to assistant.
The ideal prompt
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Manager: ‘Please email me a copy of the quarterly reports for Q2 this year. I want to edit them and send them on.’

Assistant: ‘Okay.’

The ideal prompt

So, better prompts give better answers, which leaves us with the question “What does a better prompt look like”?

In most cases, you want to be specific in the language you use for the request, and you want to supply as much relevant information as possible about the task you have set the AI. For example, you need to include the audience that will receive it and the approach you want the GenAI to follow (as in prompt 2) and style of the output you want the GenAI to produce (as in prompt 3, which is in the Activity above, Try an LLM, in the discussion section).

We’ll now consider ways in which we can supply that guidance and highlight some techniques that have been widely reported to help avoid GenAI’s worst mis-steps.

2 Using Generative AI – when is artificial intelligence a good choice?

Session 2: Single prompts, conversational prompts and personas – 90 minutes