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description: How important the right words to describe something is
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# Prompt engineering

## Introduction

Prompts or how we describe the task to overtake is becoming very important in Generative AI systems.

We will give some general ideas with little details on specific tools, trying, as much as we can, to provide a general ideas on creating good prompts, also known by some as prompt engineering.

## What is a prompt?

Generative AI models interface with the user through mostly textual input. You tell the model what to do through a textual interface, and the model tries to accomplish the task. What you tell the model to do in a broad sense is the prompt.

In the case of image generation AI models such as DALLE-2 or Stable Diffusion, the prompt is mainly a description of the image you want to generate.

<figure><img src="https://611771019-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-prod.appspot.com/o/spaces%2FKbwWlyksi3uskbTdLFc1%2Fuploads%2FIlzQxVmAIQcwXnCvPs3N%2Fimage.png?alt=media&#x26;token=8137fb61-3d64-41a3-ab37-2d46c472b135" alt=""><figcaption><p>"<em>a fat crocodile with a gold crown on his head wearing a three piece suit, 4k, professional photography, studio lighting, LinkedIn profile picture, photorealistic" using DALLE-2</em></p></figcaption></figure>

In the case of large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 or ChatGPT the prompt can contain anything from a simple question (“Who is the president of the US?”) to a complicated problem with all kinds of data inserted in the prompt (note that you can even input a CSV file with raw data as part of the input). It can also be a vague statement such as “Tell me a joke. I am down today.”



