How to perfect your prompt writing for AI generators

Dr Marcel Scharth Prompt engineering is essential for unlocking generative AI's capabilities, and luckily it isn't a technical skill, writes Dr Marcel Scharth from the University of Sydney Business School. Generative AI is having a moment. ChatGPT and art generators such as DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney have proven their potential, and now millions are wracking their brains over how to get their outputs to look something like the vision in their head. This is the goal of prompt engineering: the skill of crafting an input to deliver a desired result from generative AI. Despite being trained on more data and computational resources than ever before, generative AI models  have limitations. For instance, they're not trained to produce content aligned with goals such as truth, insight, reliability and originality. They also lack common sense and a fundamental understanding of the world, which means they can generate flawed (and even nonsensical) content.