I’ve recently begun following Ethan Mollick – see his Twitter and Substack newsletter feeds. Ethan is very advanced in his skills for prompting AI chatbots to help him get some very interesting results. He’s also co-authored three recent papers on using AI in teaching which are available on SSRN.
Mollick was recently on the Possible podcast with Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger – it’s a great edition to listen to! I made some quick notes from a few of the suggestions he made in the conversation with Hoffman and Finger and from some of his tweets and newsletters:
- “…the starting thing I would at least tell people to do that is the closest to a trick is to definitely give it context, tell it who it is and who you are. “I want to have a conversation with you as a… blank,” can really help. And then everything else kind of washes out because there’s so much subtlety in these conversations that we don’t know the answers to.”
- “Cheap variation is very easy with AI. So, what I will do is say, “give me 40 versions of this paragraph in radically different styles,” and then skim through them for inspiration, right? “Give me 20 different analogies for this.” So I think it’s that power of tireless variation that I find super interesting.” (Scott’s note: I particularly like this use case because it avoids hallucination issues.)
- “…it’s that inspiration piece — there was no way to do that before. I couldn’t ask an intern to do 20 different versions of a paragraph, right? There was no tool for that. So that, to me, is a little hack that actually has been pretty profound. Just do a lot of this, and then let me read a lot and figure out what the right answer is.”
- “One technique I use often to get ChatGPT to give me the best evaluation of a topic is to ask it to steel man two sides of an argument, then write an opinion based on the two arguments.”
- For Bing, “you should make sure you are forcing Bing to look something up with every query. Things that have worked for me include prompts like First research . Then do or else prompts like Look up _ on Reddit/in academic papers/in the news. Then use that to _. **Either way, you want to trigger the “searching for” label to get good results. The rules are still a little obscure as to what sorts of searches get triggered (does it look at specific URLs if you paste them in?) but experiment and you should be able to find something that works.”
- “You can use this approach to focus Bing on a particular approach (Look up how Bain and Company does consulting analyses and then…), to learn new skills (a favorite of mine: Look up how to create image prompts using Midjourney and write a prompt that…) or to do more complex analysis.”
There are many more gems that he’s shared – so if you’re at all interested in learning how to be more effective using any of the AI chatbots, pay attention to what Ethan Mollick is sharing – he’s doing some of the best work I’ve seen in this area!
How is your “prompting cookbook” coming along? Any new and interesting learnings to share?