Learn to Prompt Both AI and Humans

If you are interested in working with AI (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc.), in human psychology, or both, you might enjoy this episode.

If you ask yourself, “What is prompting” or “What is a super prompt” you’ll also enjoy this.

Transcript:

The Ubiquity of AI in Business

So, what prompted you to listen to this episode? Uh, get it? Oh, not yet. Well, you will. I’ve done at least two episodes on AI, the dangers of using, and so forth. AI is ubiquitous with business now. Everyone’s using it in some form or another. And why wouldn’t they when it’s pretty much shoved down your throat in every piece of software you use, whether it’s Gmail or even drawing software, scheduling software. New companies are crawling out of the woodwork practically daily saying what they do is AI powered.

I have a unique, very unbalanced way of using it. What I do use it for is sort of a language processing model. I have it take the raw transcript from these podcast episodes and then convert it into something that’s a bit more readable, but with the explicit instructions to never change a word or a syllable, regardless of how wrong it thinks the sentence is, because that’s what a transcript is. If I mess up, then I should mess up in the text as well.

What I don’t use it for is anything creative. I will never ask it for an idea. I will never ask it to give me a quick list of things that have to do with something else because I need to be able to do that or I don’t understand my subject. Do I ask for clarification? Sure. Do I ask for research sometimes, but mostly it’s a lot of mundane, tedious things that would really take a tremendous amount of time and be a complete waste of time.

The Reality of Running Local Language Models

I have learned through online use and local use quite a bit. And when I say local use, I I spun up, as they say, a copy of a local language model directly on my office computer. This was a while back and it took a lot of steps. Recently, I did it in just a few steps with an even larger model. It’s so large and so taxing on my system that when I make requests of it, I have to literally watch the temperature to make sure I don’t go over a certain point. And my computer’s smart enough to know to shut down or to or to spin down the CPU, but I it it’s barely running within the parameters that it it can run within.

That being said, I want to talk to you about prompting, but not just prompting for LLMs, but prompting for humans, because there’s a lot in common here.

When you first heard the word prompting, it probably didn’t mean a lot to you. It didn’t trigger much unless you’re someone who is in writer groups or something where you do writer prompts and things like that. But otherwise, you you probably wondered what prompting was. and it really never stuck in your brain. And because it never stuck in your brain, it’s probably not something you’ve you’ve developed as a skill.

Context Windows, Personas, and Super Prompts

Prompting is just a set of parameters you give the model you’re talking to before you really get into the conversation. And it really is a must. Now, all models have built-in prompts. They’re all basically engineered to be cheerleaders for you, to be very cheerful, to be overly agreeable, and to be overly cautious.

With a beginning prompt, you can get the AI to interact with you in a way that’s a little bit more favorable to what you want to get done. And what you have to do is think of it as a a per session kind of arrangement with it. It’s not going to be your best buddy forever and it only has so much memory. It has something c