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Developing prompts for these models isn't a science yet. It does seem to meet most of the criteria for an art though. We recognize some outputs as high qualit
by alphazard 3y ago
Developing prompts for these models isn't a science yet. It does seem to meet most of the criteria for an art though.
We recognize some outputs as high quality, and others as low quality, but often can't articulate the exact reason why. It seems that some people are able to reliably produce high quality results, indicating there is some kind of skill involved. More precisely, the quality of an individual artist's last output is positively correlated with the quality of their next output. A kind of imprecise "shop talk" has emerged, self describing as "prompt engineering", which resembles the conversations artists in other mediums have.
For people in tech this will seem most similar to graphic designers. They produce much nicer looking interfaces than lay people can. We often can't explain why, but recognize it to be the case. And graphic designers have their own set of jargon, which is useful to them, but is not scientific.
"Prompt artist" is a better term than "prompt engineer".
- DonHopkins 3y agoIn the same sense that "Bullshit artist" is a better term than "Bullshit engineer".
- rileymat2 3y agoWhy isn’t it science? Surely people can use the scientific method in investigating?
- alphazard 3y agoFor starters we don't have a way to measure quality objectively, and this is the case for art in general. If you were to develop an objective measure of beauty for example, visual art as a discipline would quickly turn into a science. At some level we know that's possible, we're all just brains in jars. But AFAIK we aren't doing science there yet. The science and engineering parts all have a measure of quality, sometimes that's a human rating, sometimes it's cross-entropy loss. There's nothing stopping someone from using the scientific method to investigate these things, but descriptively I haven't seen anyone, calling themselves a "prompt engineer/scientist", doing that yet. "I used these words, and I got this output which is nice" sounds like, "I tried using these brushes and I made this painting which is nice". I can agree with the painting being nice, but not that science was used to engineer a nice painting.
- rileymat2 3y agoBut with prompt escapes and violations of the service expectations, don’t you have an objective criteria? It gave me X information, yes or no?