These 4 techniques will level up your ChatGPT prompts

From instruction prompting to few-shot prompting

Read time: 6 minutes

Hello and welcome back to The Prompt Warrior!

As always, my mission is to transform you into a ChatGPT master by providing valuable tips, insightful examples, and effective best practices.

In this episode, we'll explore various prompting techniques. By mastering these methods, you'll not only surpass 99% of other users, but also craft your prompts with a deeper understanding and greater precision.

Let's dive right in.

šŸ’¬ Instruction prompting

The one you probably already know and use, is the simple instruction prompt. It's when you give the AI a basic instruction or ask a quick question.

You can use this for all kinds of easy tasks or quick questions you might have. But youā€™re unlikely to get very good results if it goes beyond a simple task.

Speed: fast
Results: 1/5

Hereā€™s one example:

šŸ“ Role prompting

With the role prompting technique, you give the AI a certain role. An example is to tell the AI to assume the role of an expert in a specific topic.

Doing this helps the AI come up with more accurate and context-appropriate answers. It's a great way to get better results from your prompts, while also not spending too much time writing a long prompt.

Speed: fast
Results: 2/5

Hereā€™s an example:

šŸ„‡ One-shot prompting

One-shot prompting is when you provide the AI with a single example to learn from, and it generates your desired output based on that input.

This method has some advantages. It's time-saving compared to few-shot prompting, as you only need to give the AI one example, and when executed correctly, one-shot prompting can yield impressive results.

However, you'll want to choose a solid example, since it's the only guideline the AI has to work with.

Speed: medium
Results: 4/5

In this example prompt, I give ChatGPT instructions to write a newsletter welcome email and to mimic the style of another email I have found:

And the result is a high-quality email, tailored to my needs:

šŸ’Æ Few-shot prompting

Finally, few-shot prompting is when you supply the AI with multiple examples to help it comprehend the task you're asking it to do.

This method boosts the AI's understanding, as you're giving it more than one example to learn from, which enhances its accuracy and relevance.

Just be sure to pick strong examples, as they'll serve as the foundation for the AI's response. When done well, few-shot prompting can produce remarkable outcomes.

Speed: slow
Results: 5/5

In this example, I use role prompting and few-shot prompting combined to turn ChatGPT into a Twitter threads hook generator.

The resulting hooks are much better, than if I had used only instruction or role prompting:

Want more?

If you liked these tips, have a look at my Twitter thread where I explain the main components to a good prompt.

Thatā€™s it for today!

I want to keep these newsletters short and concise, but still provide as much value as possible.

Please let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions, so that I can keep improving these newsletters for you.

Simply reply to this email with your feedback. As a thank you I will give you my collection: ā€œ100+ Thread Hooks to 10x your ChatGPT promptsā€ for free.

Thank you so much for being an early member in this community. We are just getting started!

MoritzĀ 

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