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I've seen a boom of people selling ebooks, etc. with "46 Revolutionary ChatGPT prompts" with the idea that someone found some cool behavior that could be econom

by cwkoss 4y ago

I've seen a boom of people selling ebooks, etc. with "46 Revolutionary ChatGPT prompts" with the idea that someone found some cool behavior that could be economically useful. However, I think this kind of 'engineered prompt' sharing is about as useless as sharing the engineering calculations for building a bridge over a particular river : none of those calculations are generalizable and all must be redone for each future placement. Chances are you'll need to tweak any purchased prompt to fit your own use cases, and if you are capable of tweaking purchased prompts, why can't you just chat with the bot for an hour or two and build a working prompt for yourself? I think the value of "prompt engineering" as a skill is all about adaptability and testing and verification processes: what is the process of going from idea to functioning prompt for a particular use. Silver bullet prompt fragments are cool, but not really products - the only people buying these are suckers who don't understand how to use chatGPT. Because chatGPT will happily help you make these prompts for free.

saurik 4y ago
FWIW, I watched a relatively trivial video on using ChatGPT a couple nights ago that had like 6 prompts, and while I had seen people do some of them before it was still useful: it showed me how people were using the project and massively accelerated getting to useful results. People buy books of suggestions for how to do literally everything from song writing to project management... is it really surprising that how to get the most value out of talking to an AI--something many people might find a bit strange and unnatural--is something that you could help people be better at? If the same eBook had been "46 revolutionary prompts for your next team brainstorming meeting" or "46 revolutionary ice breakers for your next party" would we even bat an eye?
- ComplexSystems 4y ago
  Do you have a link to the video?
  - saurik 4y ago
    https://youtu.be/EYjG6i53-xk https://youtu.be/EYjG6i53-xk Honestly, my favorite moment has nothing to do with the thesis of the video: it is when she says "zero-shot chain of thought" and stops talking for a moment to comment about how that rhymes, as it definitely only rhymes because of her accent; but I'm really into linguistics and, in particular, phonology, so, for me, that kind of moment is magical. But like, the point is: if you watch that video and replace the idea of you talking to ChatGPT with talking to one of your coworkers, this is a totally legitimate video someone would make. You can't quite just use a book of brainstorming ideas, though, with ChatGPT, as it has some fundamental limitations to how it understands certain kinds of concepts or language, and so seeing "oh that path worked well" is practically useful.
    - cwkoss 4y ago
      Interesting. I found most of what was described in this video fairly obvious. The prompt length one was useful non-obvious insight, but the rest of it I think is pretty easy to figure out on your own if you play with ChatGPT for a few evenings. But could certainly see it being useful to chatGPT novices. I don't doubt that there is value is sharing useful workflows to learn how to write prompts or useful things to add to prompts, but I've seen a lot of people selling a 'list of tuned prompts' as if each was a plug-and-play deployable software stack. I think anyone who tried to actually productize these prompts would find the need to tweak the prompts so much they might as well have started from scratch. In short, I think there is value in teaching people how to write prompts to custom-fit their needs, but the idea of general purpose couple-paragraph superprompts that mere knowledge of is worth tens of dollars seems fallacious to me. Disclosure: I've never bought any of these, maybe they are that good. I'm very skeptical though.
      - saurik 4y ago
        I just don't think that most people--maybe you ;P--would say the same thing about a book about how to brainstorm with a team better, as that's all you're doing when you are talking to an AI... and yet people buy those books all the time and I certainly read a few of them in my early 20s. Was it a great, earth-shattering video? No. But seeing someone quickly get concrete value from something is still of a lot of practical value for seeing how it strings together.
__loam 4y ago
There's lots of people trying to make a buck off this shit. https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/2/23582772/chatgpt-ai-get-rich-quick-schemes-hustlers-web https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/2/23582772/chatgpt-ai-get-ri...

by cwkoss 4y ago

saurik 4y ago

FWIW, I watched a relatively trivial video on using ChatGPT a couple nights ago that had like 6 prompts, and while I had seen people do some of them before it was still useful: it showed me how people were using the project and massively accelerated getting to useful results. People buy books of suggestions for how to do literally everything from song writing to project management... is it really surprising that how to get the most value out of talking to an AI--something many people might find a bit strange and unnatural--is something that you could help people be better at? If the same eBook had been "46 revolutionary prompts for your next team brainstorming meeting" or "46 revolutionary ice breakers for your next party" would we even bat an eye?

ComplexSystems 4y ago
Do you have a link to the video?
- saurik 4y ago
  https://youtu.be/EYjG6i53-xk https://youtu.be/EYjG6i53-xk Honestly, my favorite moment has nothing to do with the thesis of the video: it is when she says "zero-shot chain of thought" and stops talking for a moment to comment about how that rhymes, as it definitely only rhymes because of her accent; but I'm really into linguistics and, in particular, phonology, so, for me, that kind of moment is magical. But like, the point is: if you watch that video and replace the idea of you talking to ChatGPT with talking to one of your coworkers, this is a totally legitimate video someone would make. You can't quite just use a book of brainstorming ideas, though, with ChatGPT, as it has some fundamental limitations to how it understands certain kinds of concepts or language, and so seeing "oh that path worked well" is practically useful.
  - cwkoss 4y ago
    Interesting. I found most of what was described in this video fairly obvious. The prompt length one was useful non-obvious insight, but the rest of it I think is pretty easy to figure out on your own if you play with ChatGPT for a few evenings. But could certainly see it being useful to chatGPT novices. I don't doubt that there is value is sharing useful workflows to learn how to write prompts or useful things to add to prompts, but I've seen a lot of people selling a 'list of tuned prompts' as if each was a plug-and-play deployable software stack. I think anyone who tried to actually productize these prompts would find the need to tweak the prompts so much they might as well have started from scratch. In short, I think there is value in teaching people how to write prompts to custom-fit their needs, but the idea of general purpose couple-paragraph superprompts that mere knowledge of is worth tens of dollars seems fallacious to me. Disclosure: I've never bought any of these, maybe they are that good. I'm very skeptical though.
    - saurik 4y ago
      I just don't think that most people--maybe you ;P--would say the same thing about a book about how to brainstorm with a team better, as that's all you're doing when you are talking to an AI... and yet people buy those books all the time and I certainly read a few of them in my early 20s. Was it a great, earth-shattering video? No. But seeing someone quickly get concrete value from something is still of a lot of practical value for seeing how it strings together.

__loam 4y ago

There's lots of people trying to make a buck off this shit. https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/2/23582772/chatgpt-ai-get-rich-quick-schemes-hustlers-web https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/2/23582772/chatgpt-ai-get-ri...