Prompting

One Useful Thing | Ethan Mollick

An AI focused Substack Resource

The response you get from a chatbot changes depending on how you ask your questions, so it’s worth experimenting to create the right phrase or “prompt”. Ethan Mollick’s substack, One Useful Thing, is a good starting place for thinking about how you iterate and craft your prompts for AI.

A guide to prompting AI (for what it is worth)
Retro technology drawn and imagined in a futuristic landscape

image generated by MidJourney AI v3 with the prompt “One useful thing” in pixelart style

Recommendations for Crafting Effective AI Prompts

  • Craft a persona when writing the prompt (e.g., “You are a patient/student/instructor/philosopher,” etc.).
  • Define constraints of knowledge  (e.g., only look at research from the past 5 years).
  • Provide it with examples (e.g., type or attach examples of data or responses)
  • Refine your prompts through iteration. You can do so by responding to the chatbot as if you are in conversation.
  • Always analyze the validity of findings/outputs.
Try a Prompt Engineering Bot from OpenAI

System Prompts

You can also develop “system prompts,” which are a set of instructions given to an AI model that defines how the AI should behave, what role it should take on, and what guidelines it should follow throughout a conversation. These are kind of like programming the AI. You can usually paste these at the start of the chat, or use them to design a custom agent.  

Try Out Some System Prompts for Different Tasks

Tips for AI Prompts | AI at Yale

The goal of this training video is to introduce you to the concept of prompting when interacting with AI chatbots.

AI Literacy Topics

Explore our resources to learn more.

Circuit board design with the Yale Y tiled through out.