You’re Using ChatGPT Wrong! Here’s How to Be Ahead of 99% of ChatGPT Users

Master ChatGPT by learning prompt engineering.

The PyCoach
Artificial Corner
Published in
7 min readMar 17, 2023

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Image licensed from Shutterstock

Most of us use ChatGPT wrong.

We don’t include examples in our prompts.
We ignore that we can control ChatGPT’s behavior with roles.
We let ChatGPT guess stuff instead of providing it with some information.

This happens because we mostly use standard prompts that might help us get the job done once, but not all the time.

We need to learn how to create high-quality prompts to get better results. We need to learn prompt engineering! And, in this guide, we’ll learn 4 techniques used in prompt engineering.

If you don’t feel like reading, you can watch my video below.

Few Shot Standard Prompts

Few shot standard prompts are the standard prompts we’ve seen before, but with examples of the task in them.

Why examples? Well, If you want to increase your chances to get the desired result, you have to add examples of the task that the prompt is trying to solve.

Few-shot standard prompts consist of a task description, examples, and the prompt. In this case, the prompt is the beginning of a new example that the model should complete by generating the missing text.

Here are the components of few shot standard prompts.

Image by author

Now let’s create another prompt. Say we want to extract airport codes from the text “I want to fly from Orlando to Boston”

Here’s the standard prompt that most would use.

Extract the airport codes from this text: “I want to fly from Orlando to Boston”

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The PyCoach
Artificial Corner

My ChatGPT Course - ChatGPT Unleashed: Master GPT-4 & Prompt Engineering: bit.ly/chatgpt-pycoach