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"Prompt artist" / "prompt engineer" is already a "title" I've seen people use in the wild. Gross.

a4isms 4y ago
I find that interesting, even if I abhor its existence. Feels a little like SEO tea-leaf reading. "If I prompt this, I get that." It's like reverse-engineering the model so you can game it into doing something specific, without actually understanding how the model works and what it's actually trained on.
- bluefirebrand 4y ago
  Press button get content. Just add a second button that is "inject happy drugs" and you get a really good scifi novel that we shouldn't want to live in.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  I dunno, that sounds a lot like how I have to use Google these days.
- nickthegreek 4y ago
  I don't understand why you have to abhor its existence. I play d&d. I had 2 of my players come over last night so that I could help them generate their character photos. It took 4 hours to make both their characters. It only took 4 hours because I can prompt engineer, tweak in photoshop, understand img2img blending/inpainting methods. Someday I wont have to speak to the AI in specific ways to get what I want, but until then, prompt engineering is the winning strategy. You can be a prompt engineer and understand how the model works and what it is trained on. Most people dont want to do that. Most people don't know how microwave works, but they know how to use it to get quick fast food.
p0pcult 4y ago
>Gross Ironic, when you are on a site that seems mainly dedicated to people who use specialized language to direct computers to do repetitive things at scale.
- a4isms 4y ago
  It's slightly different. Programming languages are for the most part deterministic tools that programmers generally understand and can debug. For this audience, the interpreter or compiler is not a "black box" that we only interact with by giving it inputs and seeing what it does. Although some prompt engineers may have detailed understanding of the AI model and its training corpus, to most people using this kind of AI today the model is a black box, and it's up to them to try things. Sure, that happens in programming too, but rarely at the level of a programming language, and much more likely at the level of a complex system of poorly documented and buggy interacting parts, such as a long-standing piece of computing infrastructure that has been iterated upon for decades, and now contains a mish-mash of components, many of which were added by people no longer around to explain how they work.
  - dawsoneliasen 4y ago
    I am currently writing a blog post about this. Here’s an excerpt: “Consider, for instance, the simple existence of the term “prompt engineering,” which describes the practice of iteratively fine-tuning the prompts you submit to ChatGPT (or whatever) to get your desired output. Prompt engineering is a matter of some identification of what the model responds to, and a lot of guesswork. It’s a matter of treating the natural language of the prompt into a formal language, almost into a programming language, manipulating symbols which lose their human meaning and intuitive structure like some sort of abstract association game. You’re working with the worst programming language imaginable.” My angle is that using ChatGPT is like using a English as programming language, and it’s a terrible programming language. The reason “prompt engineering” is so irksome to me is that is supposed to be this new advanced mode of expertise, when in reality it’s just shitty programming. “The Python/C++/whatever-code isn’t some obstacle that we are trying to overcome. The code is the interface that we designed to be able to program the computer, it’s what we want and need. It’s objective, explicit, unambiguous, (relatively) static, internally consistent, and robust. English has none of these properties—it’s subjective, meaning is often implicit, and ambiguous, and it’s always changing, contradictions appear; its structure does not hold up to analysis.”
    - 4y ago

I find that interesting, even if I abhor its existence. Feels a little like SEO tea-leaf reading. "If I prompt this, I get that." It's like reverse-engineering the model so you can game it into doing something specific, without actually understanding how the model works and what it's actually trained on.

bluefirebrand 4y ago
Press button get content. Just add a second button that is "inject happy drugs" and you get a really good scifi novel that we shouldn't want to live in.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
I dunno, that sounds a lot like how I have to use Google these days.
nickthegreek 4y ago
I don't understand why you have to abhor its existence. I play d&d. I had 2 of my players come over last night so that I could help them generate their character photos. It took 4 hours to make both their characters. It only took 4 hours because I can prompt engineer, tweak in photoshop, understand img2img blending/inpainting methods. Someday I wont have to speak to the AI in specific ways to get what I want, but until then, prompt engineering is the winning strategy. You can be a prompt engineer and understand how the model works and what it is trained on. Most people dont want to do that. Most people don't know how microwave works, but they know how to use it to get quick fast food.

p0pcult 4y ago

>Gross Ironic, when you are on a site that seems mainly dedicated to people who use specialized language to direct computers to do repetitive things at scale.

a4isms 4y ago
It's slightly different. Programming languages are for the most part deterministic tools that programmers generally understand and can debug. For this audience, the interpreter or compiler is not a "black box" that we only interact with by giving it inputs and seeing what it does. Although some prompt engineers may have detailed understanding of the AI model and its training corpus, to most people using this kind of AI today the model is a black box, and it's up to them to try things. Sure, that happens in programming too, but rarely at the level of a programming language, and much more likely at the level of a complex system of poorly documented and buggy interacting parts, such as a long-standing piece of computing infrastructure that has been iterated upon for decades, and now contains a mish-mash of components, many of which were added by people no longer around to explain how they work.
- dawsoneliasen 4y ago
  I am currently writing a blog post about this. Here’s an excerpt: “Consider, for instance, the simple existence of the term “prompt engineering,” which describes the practice of iteratively fine-tuning the prompts you submit to ChatGPT (or whatever) to get your desired output. Prompt engineering is a matter of some identification of what the model responds to, and a lot of guesswork. It’s a matter of treating the natural language of the prompt into a formal language, almost into a programming language, manipulating symbols which lose their human meaning and intuitive structure like some sort of abstract association game. You’re working with the worst programming language imaginable.” My angle is that using ChatGPT is like using a English as programming language, and it’s a terrible programming language. The reason “prompt engineering” is so irksome to me is that is supposed to be this new advanced mode of expertise, when in reality it’s just shitty programming. “The Python/C++/whatever-code isn’t some obstacle that we are trying to overcome. The code is the interface that we designed to be able to program the computer, it’s what we want and need. It’s objective, explicit, unambiguous, (relatively) static, internally consistent, and robust. English has none of these properties—it’s subjective, meaning is often implicit, and ambiguous, and it’s always changing, contradictions appear; its structure does not hold up to analysis.”
  - 4y ago