Prompting ChatGPT

What is prompting?

Simply, it's what you type into the chat box.

However, it's not like typing a question into Google. Instead, you'll need to learn a few things about how to prompt effectively.                                                                             

3 things to include

1. Give it some context or a role to play.
2. Give it very detailed instructions.
3. Tell it how you would like the results formatted: a list, a table, paragraphs, even emojis!

Keep conversing and asking for changes. Ask it to revise the answer until you get what you need.

Examples

1. Example of a context or role to play: "Act as an expert [fill in the blank]."
   
   Act as an expert community organizer.
   Act as a high school biology teacher.
   Act as a comedian.
    

2. Example of detailed instructions (with format included):
   
   Act as an expert college professor. I’m writing a research paper for Sociology and I need help coming up with a topic. I’m interested in topics related to climate change. Please give me a list of 10 topic ideas related to climate change.
    

3. Example of conversing until you get something useful:
   
   Now give me some specific research questions for [one of those topics]. And give me a list of keywords and phrases I can use to search for that topic in library databases and Google Scholar.
   
   or...
   
   I didn't like any of those topics. Please give me 10 more.

Remember to always verify the information it gives you.

• All of the major models these days include web searching abilities and provide links to sources (Copilot, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT).

• Be sure to follow the links and read the original websites.

• Make sure the AI-generated summary aligns with the content of the page it came from. And make sure the page content is relevant to the task you asked the model to do.

Verifying

An additional way to check facts is to do a quick web search to find out if what it’s saying is true. Look for more than one source to verify the information. Wikipedia can be helpful as can mainstream news sites that employ fact-checkers.

There is more to learn.

If you want to learn more about prompting, try this online course from Vanderbilt University: Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT. It's on Coursera and you can audit it for free.