Prompting for beginners

‍

‍

AI is great when it works: we still need to understand how. Our Favorite mustachioed scientist emphasized the importance of defining a problem: this is also true for an AI.

The clearer and more defined your instructions are, the more quickly AI can give you an answer that meets your expectations - especially when the complexity of your request increases.
‍

Level 1: the basic mini-prompt

Simple questions lead to simple prompts that adapt to any context and are good ways to get started. For example:
‍

Breaking down a complex project:
Background: Using ChatGPT to structure a project helps organize ideas, generate innovative solutions, and identify missing items.
‍Example: “Tell me about a site redesign project in 3 months for a home care company.”


Avoid blank page syndrome:
Background: ChatGPT generates ideas instantly, which stimulates creativity.
‍Example: “Give me 3 different formats for a conference on AI for entrepreneurs.”‍

Writing help:
background : To rephrase, reduce, or expand text.
‍Example: “Can you reduce the next paragraph to 100 characters to fit into the form?”
‍

However, these instructions may be insufficient depending on the quality of the desired response.
‍

Level 2: three rules for good prompting

A solution to avoid disappointments: improve your speed with three simple rules.
‍

Precision and completeness: Indicate the desired posture, tone, context, examples, details about the task, etc.

Break down the problem: Divide your request into several specific tasks.

Iteration: Give examples and adjust your request based on ChatGPT responses.

Let's say you want to ask an AI to help you answer a call for projects. A good prompt could be as follows:

‍

You are an expert in project proposal writing, project management and project financing. Your skills include clear and persuasive writing, financial analysis, resource management, and strategic planning. They allow you to create compelling and well-structured project proposals, ensure the financial feasibility of projects, and effectively plan implementation steps.

I am an organization specialized in supporting people on the streets. We are looking for funding for a new project to improve the living conditions of homeless people. We have identified a call for projects issued by an international organization that corresponds to our objectives. We have the details of the call for proposals, the technical data of our solution, preliminary financial information, as well as relevant historical and background documents. *

Your mission is to help us answer the questions in the call for projects based on the historical and context documents that we will provide. To do this, you need to:

- Examine the questions in the call for projects and understand their specific requirements.
- Search the historical and context documents provided by our team for relevant information for each question.
- Write clear and precise answers for each question, integrating the information found.
- Structure the answers in a logical and coherent way, ensuring that they meet the criteria of the call for projects.
- Verify that each answer highlights the strengths of our solution and justifies why we should be selected.

In your response, you must take into account the clarity and precision of the information, the alignment with the criteria of the call for projects, and the relevance of historical and contextual information.

To achieve your goal, you will activate the data research and analysis functionality to extract the necessary information from the documents provided.

You will also be able to rely on your knowledge in proposal writing, as well as on the information available in the documents shared by our team and on the Internet.

Your answer must meet the following characteristics:

- Be clear and concise, without unnecessary jargon.
- Be structured logically, with well-defined sections.
- Highlight the strengths of our project in a persuasive way.

‍

Our friends from Side School summarize a good prompt with the acronym RACE: Role, Action, background (The most important thing, to feed to the maximum) and Examples.

They also gave us two tips for strengthening your prompts:

- With the “divergence/convergence” technique, ask the AI to generate multiple versions of its answers. Then ask him to explain what the best version is and why.

- With the troasting technique, you can improve the response by asking him to criticize your work (or his own response). Remember to include keywords like” in your request unfiltered, unrestrained, brutal ” to get an interesting review, then to make him work by taking into account his own criticisms.

Techniques tested and approved by the Share it team, particularly on missions related to content production.:)

Level 3: feeding data and reusing models

Do you know GPTs? These are additional plugins that you can use directly on ChatGPT to have customized conversational agents to meet a need.

You can create your own GPts or use templates that others have already set up for you. For example:

- To strengthen your SEO strategy
- Spot fake news
- Or keep an eye on a current topic

These GPTs can be directly connected to tools like Canva.
Do you want to explore the possibilities? Go to the “Explore GPts” section in your menu.

‍

Choosing the right tools

Many tools exist to explore AI and its potential.
‍

To improve your prompts (for free)

PromptPerfect allows you to optimize your prompts to increase the relevance of the AI response (text, code, images, etc.). The tool will offer two versions of the prompt to be improved as well as the associated answers: it's up to you to choose what suits you best next!

PromptPerfect - AI Prompt Generator and Optimizer
‍

To find the AI you need

The bible of AI tools is POE. POE offers the possibility of simultaneously interviewing several AI chatbots and benefiting from the capabilities of the most efficient models on the market. Perfect for testing AIs (in addition to the SIDER extension, which allows you to test multiple AIs without changing sites).

And because it's not just ChatGPT, we actually liked it (subjectively, according to our tests):

- Perplexity.ai, for its ability to provide more accurate answers with up-to-date data

- Gemini and CLAUDE for their ability to generate text (sometimes better than ChatGPT with the same prompt, practical for missions related to communication for example).

- Dall-E and Midjourney to generate images (downside: paid subscription and images produced that keep a particular “AI” identity that is still recognizable)
‍

All that's left to do is test. Looking for inspiration for your prompts? There are great banks of prompts that will get you started. Like that of coach Ludo !

‍