Prompt Engineering for Humans

Like most people, I’ve been thinking a lot about chatGPT and the implications of generative AI in our society. I find particularly interesting the concept of prompt engineering.

When I ask ChatGPT about it, it says: “The goal of prompt engineering is to help guide the model's behavior and generate more accurate and relevant outputs.”

With that in mind, I think it is safe to say that, prompt engineering assumes that a good structured question results in a high-quality answer. Or put another way, the answer that you get from ChatGPT, or any large language model, is highly dependent on how you frame your questions and interactions with the model.

Putting it this way reminds me a lot of the findings Dr. Robert Cialdini published in his book “Influence, new and expanded: the psychology of persuasion”. Where he shares insights from research into the tools of influence. Which one way or another states the following: depending on how you frame a question, request, or pitch, you are more likely to get your requested answer.

I think is no coincidence that humans, and generative AI share this. After all, AI is made by humans, in our image (kind of).

This thought re-sparked my interest in cognitive biases, and all the special ways that our brain tricks itself or can be tricked by others.

Reciprocity

There are a couple of tools you can use to be more persuasive and to exercise more influence. The first one that Cialdini shares is Reciprocity. The main idea here is that people feel a significant amount of appreciation by receiving a gift or favor from someone else. Regardless of whether the gift is physical, digital, or some type of service. Thanks to this appreciation, people are more likely to want to return the favor in some way.

There is a catch though. This willingness to return the favor is likely to decrease over time. There are exceptions of course, like the French village that donated 30,000$+ for an Australian’s town bushfire relief. In April 1918 thousands of Australian soldiers lost their lives freeing the French town of Villers-Bretonneux from German forces. 100+ years later they still remember. More on that fascinating story here.

Back to the topic. When it comes to reciprocity it is better to follow Cialdini’s Bagel rule as a rule of thumb. People appreciate them more when they’re fresh and warm rather than old and stale.

Essentially, we are in a way wired to want to return someone’s favors or gift. But this willingness to return a favor fades over time.