Does Prompt Engineering Really Work?
I've been studying prompt engineering lately to automate tasks with ChatGPT. I'm curious whether assigning roles like 'You are an expert' or giving step-by-step instructions actually significantly improves output quality. Personally, I didn't notice much difference between 'Summarize this' and 'As an expert, summarize this report.' Has anyone else experienced this? If you have any tips, please share.
6 answers
What model version are you using? I found that role assignment feels more noticeable with GPT-4. There wasn't much difference with GPT-3.5, but after the upgrade, it definitely changed. Also, writing something more specific like 'You are a data analyst with 10 years of experience' rather than just 'You are an expert' was helpful.
I genuinely feel that prompt engineering is effective. Especially in complex tasks, 'step-by-step instructions' make a significant difference. When I provide a sequence like 'Step 1: Organize the data, Step 2: Extract key points, Step 3: Summarize in around 100 characters,' the output becomes much more structured and accurate.
Sharing my experience. Rather than assigning an 'expert' role, it was more effective to clarify the 'context and purpose.' For example, when I added 'This report will be used as educational material for beginners,' the output became much more targeted.
On the other hand, I feel that the 'expert' role makes the output too rigid, so try giving it a role like a 'friendly colleague.' Also, from my experiments, asking 'Summarize the core of this article in 3 sentences so that even an elementary school student can understand it' worked much better than just saying 'Summarize this.'
I agree. At first, even adding 'expert' gave similar results, but recently combining 'persona + output format + constraints' has noticeably improved quality. For example, 'You are a marketing expert. Write this text as 3 Instagram ad copies, each within 50 characters.' Give it a try!
I felt the same way at first, but just assigning a role didn't make much of a difference. However, when I added 'specific formats' and 'examples,' it definitely changed things. For instance, giving conditions like 'summarize in three lines, with the first line being the conclusion' produces much better results.