AI prompting 101: How to get the chatbots to work for you

"AI-powered chatbots can be really good for you if you take the time to use them properly, if you don't, it's never going to deliver much more than boring mediocrity."

That’s the advice from Tiffany Markman, communication consultant, writer and speaker who was on 702’s Relebogile Mabotja’s tech segment.

Markman defined AI, in mainstream terms: “When humans put a prompt or multiple lines of text into a large language model - which is the fancy name for an AI platform - and then expect to get some kind of output as a result. Either text or an image or a piece of code. So that’s the kind of AI that we are speaking about in the mainstream that most normal humans, not tech people, will use is generative AI.”

Why are many people still using it like a Google search?

“I think a lot of the people who aren’t using AI regularly tried it out in the beginning and maybe tried it out without using it optimally and so it didn’t give them what they wanted. And so perhaps they’re not using it often. And those of us who are completely obsessed with it are trying to get better and better at our input.

“So prompt is just a fancy name for the text input that we as humans put into the platform. It’s really just a pattern recognition platform. So basically what happens is we put input into that platform and as a result of our input the AI platform predicts the most likely and logical text to use to respond to us. So, on that basis you can see that the quality of your prompt directly affects the quality of what you get.

"If you pop in the kind of phrasing and language you would use in a standard Google search. You're not really using the platform in the optimal way."

What are some of the tips for somebody getting started with AI?

“There are many different ones; ChatGPT being the most common. There’s Gemini, Co-pilot, loads of others… but the rules for prompting them are much the same across all of them.

"The most important thing is you’ve got to tell it more than you would think it needs to know. In other words, you’ve got to spoon feed it. You’ve got to give it information on who the audience is for the outcome."

How can it help you update your CV, and make it only one page?

“The first thing I would do, is I would say. I want you to help me create a CV, using this information. So I would upload a PDF or Word document of my existing CV. I would say here are the job specs that I’ve been given by the recruiter or by the recruitment platform so I’m sending the CV in response to this particular job spec. Then I would say I want it to be only one page so you going to have to use tables or some kind of an info graphic style in order to fit everything in. I would say that it’s perhaps for a South African recruitment company that’s looking to place me in a financial services position just so that the language and vocab is right. And then I would say, you know my personal speaking and writing style might be described as whatever and then insert professional, clear, confident, honest, transparent. Just to give it a sense of you as a human so it doesn’t sound too generic.”

Markman says the best tip she has is that you mustn't think that the platform is some kind of genius. "What you put in is what you’re going to get out so take the time to craft a prompt that will really serve your specific needs in the moment. Don’t put all the heavy lifting onto the platform. Do a little bit of the thinking yourself first. Then it will give you AI generated output and then apply your human brain to that again to refine it to make it sound like you to make it relevant. It’s not a once step process. It’s at minimum a three to four step process.”

To listen to Markman's full discussion with 702’s Relebogile Mabotja, click the link below: