5 tips for writing great AI prompts: How to provide the best prompts for artificial intelligence chatbots

Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool that helps automate simple tasks, thus saving time and effort. For many of us, the easiest way to get access to AI tools is through popular AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, or Microsoft Copilot on our smartphones, tablets and even laptops.

These chatbots rely on conversational prompts from the user to generate the ideal answers, which can be in the form of simple but concise statements detailing the subject matter and specific requirements of the user.

The correct use of AI prompts – also known as prompt engineering – involves writing, refining, and aiding generative AI tools to produce the best written content for your purposes. Even the best AI tools require clear and concise inputs to be able to generate crisp and meaningful content.

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Furthermore, getting your prompts right will ensure that you save time, rather than having to spend so much time training the AI that you might as well have written it yourself.

5 tips for writing great AI prompts

1. Give the AI a persona

2. Outline the specific task

3. Help the AI with specific context

4. Instruct on the desired output structure

5. Keep in mind accuracy and security

1. Give the AI a persona

Your prompt should try to give the AI a persona, in order to have it frame its response in a way that is understandable and clear as to its purpose. 

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For example, you can ask the AI chatbot to write a response as if it were a journalist, author, or marketing professional, in order to get the right tone of voice in the response.

2. Outline the specific task

It’s important to define the specific task at hand, which will help to generate the response following the correct framework.

For example, you may ask the AI chatbot to write a blog post, itinerary, social media post for X, or just a short summary for easy understanding.

3. Help the AI with specific context

Sometimes, it might help to give specific context as to what kind of response you want, for the AI chatbot to frame a more personalised and specific response.

For example, you could provide an email thread when asking for text for an email response, in order to provide the right context and get a more detailed and relevant response.

4. Instruct on the desired output structure

Detailed instructions can help the AI chatbot to frame the response in a way that works for you, so you don’t have to further crunch the data.

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For example, you may ask for the response to be in the form of bullet points, headers, tables, a summary, or just about anything of the sort.

5. Keep in mind accuracy and security

AI chatbots use information provided by users to improve responses over time, and may thus store and use any prompts provided by you for use in the future with other users entirely autonomously. 

Be careful when providing sensitive information, and also make sure to check the response for accuracy and correctness before using the AI-generated responses in any professional or personal use cases.