5 Conversational prompting, or prompt sequences
Most of the commercial GenAI systems allow for conversations – they recall previous prompts and responses in the conversation. This means you can add more information to an initial prompt or adapt some aspect of the prompt using further prompts in the conversation.
We saw an example of that in the third attempt at the poem in section 5 above, where we referred in prompt 3 to aspects of the early prompt 2. Outside of the conversation prompt 3 doesn’t make sense.
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.
This allows for the A (Adaptive) in CLEAR – try different prompts to see what effect they have on the output delivered and adjust prompts if you don’t get what you want first time. But be aware, the systems do have a limit to how much they remember. When they reach that limit, they ‘forget’ the older content.
If you supply a long initial prompt containing a lot of information, and the resulting conversation goes on for several exchanges involving long prompts, you will reach a point where the GenAI begins to forget the initial prompt and so the responses can start to wander. At that point you will need to restart the conversation.
The ability to hold a conversation to develop and improve the prompt has led prompt engineers to explore other ways to get the LLMs to respond in helpful ways. We’ve picked out three examples which appear to make GenAIs respond more effectively to prompts.
