46 How to Prompt AI Chatbots
Joel Gladd
Many of you are gamers or you’re familiar with video games. Imagine you’ve just unlocked the most powerful character in your favorite game but you have no idea which button combinations actually work. Spamming random buttons might get you somewhere but definitely won’t unlock the character’s true potential. That’s similar to what it’s like having access to AI chatbots without knowing how to “talk” to them effectively. By the end of this chapter, you should know how to get started with these digital assistants to help you in a variety of ways.
Note that this chapter offers a starter kit rather than a thorough introduction. We’re not going to provide you with a cheat sheet for how to complete the entire role-playing game, so to speak. These are just some tips for how to get started and how to think strategically about interacting with Generative AI (GenAI) chatbots like ChatGPT. There can be much, much more to prompting than this. The end of this chapter suggests ways to go further.
Understanding AI Chatbots: The Basics
When you open ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, or Microsoft Copilot, you’ll see what looks like a simple text box.
Prompting a chatbot sometimes feels like having a very knowledgeable friend who has somehow memorized the entire internet but needs clear directions to be helpful.
- The AI processes your request as a series of tokens, first by filtering it through the platform’s instructions (keeping it safe, ethical, etc.) and then sending it to the trained model.
- After querying the model, the chatbot responds with its response.
Unlike Google Search, which treats each query like a stranger asking for directions, AI chatbots remember your chat history and can build upon previous exchanges. They can refer back to earlier parts of your conversation and build on them. They’ll also remember any documents you’ve shared, like class notes or assignments, at least until their memory (called a “context window”) gets full.
All this starts with a prompt.
The Three Core Elements of a Good Prompt
There are countless guides and frameworks to help with “prompt engineering”. In this chapter we’re going to provide a highly simplified starting point, but know that you can make this as sophisticated and complex as you’d like, depending on your use. Most of the strategies you’ll come across have three basic elements:
1. Context
Start by explaining your situation. This is the “You are here” part of the map.
2. Task
This is your destination—what you want to accomplish.
3. Instructions
These are the turn-by-turn directions for how you want the task done. Sometimes you might see “formatting” suggestions in this part.
Let’s look at some examples of how you can leverage these three elements to build successful prompts. Note that while these examples clearly label each element (context, task, instructions) the model will usually be able to pick out these things without specific labels. What matters is what