Prompt engineering is the practice of designing, structuring, and refining natural language instructions (prompts) to guide AI models, especially generative AI, toward producing desired outputs. It involves carefully crafting questions, commands, and providing context, examples, and specific phrasing to influence the AI's response, much like giving detailed directions to an assistant. This new discipline helps users unlock the full potential of AI by improving output quality, accuracy, and relevance across various applications, from chatbots to healthcare and software development.
Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that creates new content, such as text, images, video, audio, and code, by learning patterns from existing data. It operates on neural networks and deep learning algorithms that can generate novel content in response to a user's natural language prompt. While it enhances productivity and offers numerous applications, it also presents risks like generating inaccurate information (hallucinations) and raises concerns about intellectual property and job displacement.