My Winning Prompts - 3
The third task came with a tricky constraint - we were not allowed to use any AI tools. The answer had to be written straight into a text editor, with no opportunity to have an AI help with either drafts or improvements.
The task was as follows:
Task 3: Explain a complicated subject
Background: You are going to explain a subject to one or more people with no, or limited, prior knowledge of the topic. To make sure the knowledge has landed, you also want to test the person’s (or persons’) understanding of the subject afterwards.
Task: Choose a subject of your choice. Write a prompt that instructs an AI assistant to help you explain the subject so that it becomes easy to understand, and then test that the knowledge sticks.
In the weeks leading up to the competition, I had been getting requests to explain “prompting” to curious friends and acquaintances. It struck me then that “prompting” is still pure black magic to most people - many hadn’t even heard the word before. Perfect - here was my “complicated subject”! And as a bonus, I would get an explanation I could pull out as an ace up my sleeve the next time someone asked me what I actually do for a living.
Just as in the first and second tasks, I gave the AI a persona - this time it got to be an AI engineer with the gift of the gab.
I was reminded of a video I had seen on Wired, where the physicist Sean Carroll (host of the excellent “Mindscape Podcast”) explained a physics concept to a child, a teenager, a college student, a graduate student, and an expert.
Sean Carroll’s tiered explanation method was tailor-made for the task. If I was going to have the AI explain prompting anyway, why not ask it to do so at five different difficulty levels? A strategy with a double payoff - besides solving the competition task, I would now have ready-made explanations tailored for every occasion. Because who knows? With a competition win under my belt, I might soon be touring as an AI evangelist, from preschools to retirement homes!
Analogies always help me understand new topics, so that became part of the prompt.
Finally, I wanted the AI to generate some straightforward questions to make sure the person I had explained things to was actually following along.
I wrote all of this up and submitted the following answer to the task:
You are a senior AI engineer, and also a skilled communicator with the ability to explain complicated subjects to people with limited prior knowledge in an easygoing and entertaining way.
I now want you to help me briefly describe what “prompting” an AI is, and I want you to prepare this explanation for the following personas:
- a five-year-old
- a middle school student
- a high school student
- an adult (over 20 years old).
Each description should include analogies for domain-specific terms (such as AI, LLM, prompt) that make it easy for each persona to absorb and understand the description.
Make sure you include concrete examples of how prompting can be used for different tasks that may be of interest to the respective persona.
I also want each description of the subject to end with five straightforward questions, ensuring that the person who received the explanation has understood the concepts and ideas that were covered.