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Ask HN: How to improve my skills in prompt engineering?

by pedrodelfino on 2/15/23, 4:51 PM with 20 comments

• by PaulHoule on 2/15/23, 4:57 PM

  Practice. Keep notes on what works for you. Pay attention to what other people do and take the best ideas.

  What is certain is that the field is changing and the tricks that work today will not necessarily work tomorrow.

  For instance there was a version of DALL-E Mini that had an original character in it named "Darts Vader" that was exactly what you think. They rebuilt the model and "Darts Vader" went away and we never saw him again.

  Most importantly, ChatGPT's greatest competence is that people give it credit for things it almost did right. Being a better prompt engineer is not going to overcome the structural deficiencies that cause ChatGPT output to be factually incorrect; a better prompt engineer is going to help ChatGPT maximize its bullshitting capability and in fact will have some of the skills that Emperor had in this story

  https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/68/fairy-tales-and-other-traditio...

• by erulabs on 2/15/23, 5:55 PM

  Past results are no indication of future performance... But I can't recommend enough against specializing in using someone else's product. Take AI classes, learn about neural networks, build something with AI - but don't spend weeks learning how to make ChatGPT return something interesting. That's a bit like spending weeks learning how to maintain IBM mainframes - it might be a lucrative job for a while - but it may also vanish more or less overnight in favor of something else. Microsoft, just like IBM, is more than happy for you to be a Microsoft engineer or an IBM engineer. I'd suggest just being an computer engineer, instead.

  Prompt Engineering isn't a thing - it should be called "amateur ChatGPT enthusiast".

• by jstx1 on 2/15/23, 5:14 PM

  Don't pretend that it's already a thing.

• by anonzzzies on 2/15/23, 6:21 PM

  Set goals for results you want to get from it. And then just practice. With different systems; sd, mj, chatgpt, gpt3, gptj etc. Because they differ and they change because of retraining, fine tuning or based on the prompts that result in information (text, images etc) its creators did not want it to give out.

• by kerpotgh on 2/15/23, 5:57 PM

  Ha it’s been interesting to see this term gradually showing up in parlance and turning itself into a real job over time.