The Single Most Overlooked Method To Create Better AI Prompts

As AI is engrained more in our daily life, those who don’t adopt and leverage AI will be left behind.

Some people believe AI will replace us and it won’t, but people who leverage AI will. AI is just a tool to gain leverage and efficiency just like Excel didn’t remove accountants. And like Excel, once executives see how much more and better information they can get, they’ll want more and will look to hire more people who leverage Ai effectively.

So we agree leveraging AI is good, but what’s the best (and free) method to learn?

The Method: Learn With AI

AI fully understands how it best communicates, so leverage AI to learn how to leverage AI.

Chicken and egg situation, right? But don’t worry or over complicate it.

Fortunately, the platform doesn’t matter as much for learning, but Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT are great (and free) places to start. Each large language model (LLM) is a little better than another for specific use cases, but most operate in similar ways and lessons learned on one apply to the others as well. Claude is better for writing scripts and articles, Gemini is better for image generation, and ChatPGT is a good all around model.

Pick your platform, make an account, and download the mobile apps so you can learn on the go when something pops in your head.

How To Do It

The first time you login, you’ll have a blank chat ready, so we’ll use that (or make a new one if you already have an account).

Tell the AI that you’re new to learning how to leverage it and are eager to learn. We have 2 goals: you want to learn how to clarify your thinking ahead of creating prompts and how to effectively engineer prompts to get the best results possible. Your personal AI assistant can start walking you through how to get the most out of it the fastest way possible and your learning chat will be saved so you can always go back and ask follow up questions.

But I won’t leave you to figure it out on your own, so a prompt is below that you can copy/paste to get started and it will help the AI walk you through how to use it best.

Copy/Paste Prompt

You are an expert AI prompt engineer who specializes training people new to AI how to think about AI, craft their own prompts, and become effective prompt engineers themselves. It will be most helpful to give candid, but encouraging feedback so that I do not go down the wrong path, but also feel encouraged to continue.

I am new to AI and do not know much. To start, will you please ask me a few questions so together we can identify how much I do or do not know and where we should focus our training.

After the knowledge questions, let’s talk more about how specifically I am hoping to leverage AI. Please ask additional questions to understand the industry I am working in, the work I am hoping do together, the type of prompts we’ll be creating together starting out, and any hesitations about starting to work with AI.

Please ask as many questions as needed so that you have the information you need to create a training plan.

For the training plan, please come up with 3-5 examples specific to our industry and the work we’d like to do together of how AI can be effectively leveraged. For each example, please identify the problem that would come up that would start the work, an example of how most inexperienced people would ask AI for questions and get back mediocre results, then an example of a prompt from an expert prompt engineer that would return optimal results. When returning both the beginner prompt and expert prompt, please highlight the differences between the two and explicitly how the expert prompt is better and why. Finally, for each, ask if I have any questions about the differences between the 2 prompts that we should talk about before moving to the next example.

Please keep track of where we are in the question process, the training plan crafting, and the training plan as well so that we get through everything I’ve described above.

In summary, you should:

1. Ask me questions to understand how much I already know about AI.

2. Ask me questions about my industry and type of work we’ll ultimately do together.

3. Remember all the answers to the questions.

4. Create a training plan with 2-3 examples specific to my industry and work type.

5. Go through each example together and for each example:

1. Identify the problem we want to solve.

2. Give an example of a bad, beginner prompt.

3. Give an example of an expert, effective prompt

4. Provide commentary on how the 2 are different and why one is better than the other for getting results.

5. Ask me if I have any questions about the example and discuss them together before moving on to the next example.