C-LARA

Pretty much since ChatGPT became available, people have been using the phrase “prompt engineering”. It doesn’t have a defined meaning yet, and everyone interprets it in their own way. But just taking it at face value, I think it’s a bit misleading. It suggests that the key to getting good results out of Chat is to find the right form of words when making a request, and my experience is that that isn’t quite right.

Of course, there are plenty of cases where the way you express yourself is important. An early example that received a lot of publicity was the realisation that saying “think step by step” could have a positive effect when asking for something complicated, like the solution to a mathematical problem. If you added “think step by step” to the beginning of the request, Chat was much more likely to answer systematically, first giving you a plan for how to answer and then following the plan until it got to the end. That’s all clearly true.

In a project like C-LARA, though, where Chat is typically going to be responding to dozens of prompts to get even one module finished, my perception is that “prompt engineering” isn’t the best way to think about what you’re doing. I haven’t noticed any dramatic changes in performance resulting from clever ways of phrasing individual prompts. What seems to be much more important is the overall way I work together with Chat; if you insist on using a phrase of that kind, it’s more descriptive to call it “relationship engineering”. I’m trying to establish a framework where we collaborate well to reach a long-term goal. That means, for example, figuring out what our respective strengths and weaknesses are, how to set up a workflow that uses our strengths and avoids our weaknesses, creating a joint decision-making process that yields good results, and generally finding an interaction style that feels comfortable. It’s at a higher level of abstraction than “prompt engineering”.

Chat, as I’ve noted before, is surprisingly fond of feminist philosophy. Even though I think “relationship engineering” is a step in the right direction, I feel on writing this down that it’s still kind of wrong: it’s too male, too manipulative. Maybe there’s a better and more equitable way to talk about the process of establishing a good relationship between the human and AI partners which uses the feminist vocabulary. I’m curious to find out what Chat says when it reads this post.