Non-Triviality: These prompts are not obvious or trivial. They are not something that an average person would typically think of writing as a prompt without any external resource or template.
Machine psychology: Prompts that take advantage of the particularities and quirks of how the AI model “thinks,” especially when these quirks are counter-intuitive, provide value. For example, researchers have found that generative AI performance can be improved through prompting that is motivational, encourages reflection and self monitoring, considering alternatives, and step by step thinking through a problem. Sometimes generative AI models work great with prompts that are not purely in human language, and use a combination of code-style instructions with natural language.
Expert Insight & Priming: They go deeper into areas of expertise or bring in more detailed expert or domain knowledge than the average person would with a simple prompt. For example, instead of asking Midjourney to create interior design mock-ups, you would specify a specific interior designer’s style and keywords related to that style, or describe an interior design context in such detail that the AI can create mock-ups useful for that context. This typically involves reviewing important research and incorporating the findings of that research into the prompt. An important impact of this expert knowledge is that the more expert language used in the prompt provides the AI with context priming, guiding it to produce more expert-level output because the statistical patterns in its neural network are more likely to associate expert output with expert input.
Expert Detailing: They specify details in ways that require expert knowledge or a considerable amount of time and effort to write (for example styles of important artists known by experts, or step by step instructions or valuable guidelines provided by experts, or lists of keywords that require time and research to collect).
Framework Application: They apply helpful frameworks of thinking and reasoning to aid AI-assisted thinking (for example design thinking, reasoning techniques, two by two frameworks).
Creativity & Novelty: They connect ideas or styles together that were otherwise difficult or costly to connect or others hadn’t thought of connecting them before or hadn’t realized the value of connecting them.
Discovery & Insight: They help people discover things they did not know or identify their blind spots.
Access Expansion: They allow us to benefit from the ideas, knowledge, or styles of writing or thinking of people we would otherwise not have access to or would be difficult to access.
Learning & Problem Solving: They help people learn concepts or material that would otherwise be hard to learn or solve problems that are difficult to solve.
Representation & Inclusivity: They allow us to foreground the contributions of marginalized or lesser-known experts or enable us to learn more about marginalized, oppressed or silenced people(s), or highlight such people(s) in outputs despite regular biases against them due to lack of training data or biased training data used in AI development.
Structuring: They help structure the thinking process or the output of the AI in useful or insightful ways. Use of markdown language can aid in the formatting of output structure.
Capability Enhancing: A well-designed prompt may be able to push the AI model to enhance its capabilities. When using the prompt, the AI will be able to successfully accomplish tasks or correctly answer questions that it could not answer with a vanilla / simple prompt (for example by just saying “please find the answer to this question”), or could only answer with a significantly lower success rate. The prompt “take a deep breath and think through this problem step by step” is an example of a prompt that helped some AI models improve their math problem solving success rates.
Evaluation Criteria Prompt engineering reports will be evaluated based on the following criteria:
Usefulness of the prompt (see above criteria)
Creativity: going beyond cliches, and includes clever and novel ideas that really stretch the mind