I’m a Prompt Engineer! Well, that’s an overstatement, but I did successfully complete the course, “Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT.” It served a two-fold purpose for me. First, it provided a valuable opportunity to deepen my knowledge and understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) as I’m curious about how it will continue to disrupt learning and other aspects of our daily lives. Secondly, I found the class on Coursera, the largest Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) provider that offers more than 7,000 courses to more than 100 million students globally (19 million in the U.S. alone) in a variety of languages.
My prompt engineering course was taught by the Computer Science Department Chair at Vanderbilt University, and he was great. I was intrigued by the business model of charging just $49 per month until I completed the course. Initially, I had high hopes of completing the six-module course in one month; however, as is often the case for so many students, life got in the way, and the course took me two months to complete.
Given that most of my formal education occurred prior to the Internet (for real), I never considered myself an “online learner” and stayed away from pursuing any online offerings. However, I’ve been closely observing MOOCs for the past decade, witnessing their remarkable appeal to millions of people around the world. I was pleased with the convenience of blocking out an hour here and there on weekends to watch the video lectures, do the assigned readings, take notes, and complete the assessments.
It was interesting to assign prompt and audience “personas,” such as the role of a travel agent crafting a vacation itinerary, a 7-year-old requesting a bedtime story, a woodpecker learning to survive an Upstate New York winter, or an organization like MVCC reflecting on aspirations and apprehensions regarding its trajectory over the next five years. The practice of submitting prompts and asking ChatGPT to suggest improvements for those prompts also proved to be unexpectedly enlightening. It’s a strategy I hadn’t previously considered, but it sure makes sense and works quite well!
Some assignments were more interesting than others. I enjoyed the Few-Shot prompt pattern where I had to describe the input (such as a student needing to drop and add a class), instruct ChatGPT to “think” (for instance, securing the student identification number), and then direct it to take “action” (such as entering the student ID, securing the class schedule, and executing the drop/add process). With little effort, I essentially surfaced the basic programming behind an AI-enabled scheduling bot. This is why I love the slightly trick question — “What is the most important programming language for AI?” — the answer being “English.” It’s all about phrasing and leveraging the prompts to achieve the desired outcome.
The course went on to teach several different prompt patterns, including Game Play, Template, Recipe, Chain-of-Thought, Ask for Input, and Outline Expansion. My favorite, however, was the “Alternate Approaches” prompt pattern where I provided some context and asked for alternative perspectives or strategies. I thought of an AI career coach and described myself as a young college graduate interested in a 40-year career with distinct goals in a chosen field and asked for two to three job titles in four- to five-year increments throughout the 40 years. ChatGPT came back with four or five questions to clarify my interests, then provided an informative outline of three different career paths complete with relevant job titles to consider at each stage of my fictional career. Fascinating.
I still have a lot to learn about artificial intelligence — we all do. Its impact on our world is already palpable, and I believe it will only continue to accelerate disruption in ways that are hard to comprehend right now. Here’s an interesting opinion piece about AI (it may have the NYTimes firewall) and the importance of human skills in an uncertain future. While some people fear the potential negative possibilities of AI and others are excited about it (including investors in the stock market these days), I’m trying to stay tethered somewhere in the middle to see the pros and cons more clearly. Given all the unknowns with AI, one thing I do know is that I need to take responsibility for my own learning and continue finding ways to “muck around” in the messiness, building my understanding and honing my skills to successfully navigate an AI-enabled future. I hope you do the same.
If you have any questions or comments on this post, please contact me directly at presblog@mvcc.edu
