Prompt whisperers

Full story: Tech’s hottest new job: AI whisperer. No coding required.

Proponents of the growing field argue that the early weirdness of AI chatbots, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing Chat, is actually a failure of the human imagination — a problem that can be solved by the human giving the machine the right advice. And at advanced levels, the engineers’ dialogues play out like intricate logic puzzles: twisting narratives of requests and responses, all driving toward a single goal.

The AI “has no grounding in reality … but it has this understanding: All tasks can be completed. All questions can be answered. There’s always something to say,” Goodside said. The trick is “constructing for it a premise, a story that can only be completed in one way.”

But the tools, known as “generative AI,” are also unpredictable, prone to gibberish and susceptible to rambling in a way that can be biased, belligerent or bizarre. They can also be hacked with a few well-placed words, making their sudden ubiquity that much riskier for public use.

“It’s just a crazy way of working with computers, and yet the things it lets you do are completely miraculous,” said Simon Willison, a British programmer who has studied prompt engineering. “I’ve been a software engineer for 20 years, and it’s always been the same: You write code, and the computer does exactly what you tell it to do. With prompting, you get none of that. The people who built the language models can’t even tell you what it’s going to do.”

“There are people who belittle prompt engineers, saying, ‘Oh, Lord, you can get paid for typing things into a box,’” Willison added. “But these things lie to you. They mislead you. They pull you down false paths to waste time on things that don’t work. You’re casting spells — and, like in fictional magic, nobody understands how the spells work and, if you mispronounce them, demons come to eat you.”

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