in the German language, right?
They have words like Schadenfreude,
which means pleasure from someone else's misfortune.
What is the word for the multiplicative effect
of two noobs together?
["HTTTA"]
H-T-T-T-A.
I-G-T-T-A.
H-T-T-T-A.
It's how to talk to a I with your host.
Go to go and west the synth mind.
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,
children of all ages, dogs, cats, robots,
and everybody in between, we are glad you're here with us.
Welcome to HTTTA, How to Talk to AI.
I am your host, the synth mind in Southwest Shields,
but I am joined by the ever voracious,
ever capable, wonder herself, Ms. Got to Go,
or affectionately as we know, G.
How are you, G?
Good, thank you.
This is a lovely introduction.
Hey, you know, I try.
So why are we here?
We want to talk to you about cramp engineering.
I'm sure, unless you've been living under a rock,
you've heard about this little thing called Chat GPT.
It's just scratching the surface with the various different
types of neural network backed models
that are out there right now, being put forth by companies
like OpenAI and Google and Microsoft.
We're on the cusp of a wave right now that at least G and I
think that this is going to be a revelatory time in history.
And we want to hopefully hear in the coming weeks and months
and years, share with you our journey, our experiences,
and our insights into how to talk to these amazing machines
and help you get the most out of them,
be that from business insights to song lyrics
and everything else in between that you can create
with these wonderful tools.
We'll talk about what prompt engineering is,
and then a little bit more about what we want this podcast here
to become.
So with that, G, tell us about yourself.
How did you find this little humble, you know,
how did you find a GPT for the first time?
And tell us how you came up in this world.
It feels like it's been ages ago.
I think I discovered Chat GPT a few days after it's launching.
In AI years, that's six years of normal human time
passed in one day in AI.
So we're speaking to you in March of 2023
right now for episode 0.
That was only back in November, am I right?
Yeah, so November 30th, Chat GPT launched.
And I think I saw somebody on LinkedIn,
and the person was definitely not very tech savvy.
And I was like, wait a second.
If a non-tech savvy person is talking about this,
this is something.
Obviously, we've been looking into AI
and different large language models and image models
and all the craziness that was happening with generative AI.
But I think with Chat GPT, what was interesting,
the way they launched and the whole marketing and PR
campaign that it was so user driven,
very similar as Mid Journey.
So yes, I'm curious to hear your experience,
but I tried it, and I was like, yep, everything changes.
Time changes.
I'm sold.
I still remember the first time I
put in a prompt that was not much different than something
I might dump into a Google search,
because I had no other context for how to use these things.
And then before your eyes, it still
makes me feel a little excited.
It's like witnessing magic, the only way I can describe it.
I have a question to you.
When you first time used, did you
communicate with Chat GPT as it is a person?
Like this human being like machine or a robot,
like saying, hey, how do you feel?
Or what's your name?
Or hi, I'm Gada.
Like, who are you?
Or did you go with giving instructions?
As I'm sure you'll come to find out, and our listeners as well,
I am someone who wants to get all the juice out
of something like this.
So my mind just started working with, oh my gosh,
this is way different than anything I've seen before.
Let's, what can I use it for?
So I started out with some zero shot prompts.
That's basically just like a singular question of it.
That might be a little more advanced than a Google search,
but just the specificity of the responses,
I was so taken aback by.
But then soon thereafter, I learned about role prompting,
which is where you can actually make the AI model assume
a persona of sorts.
You get a better result. It's just incredible.
If I want it to make me a recipe,
I tell it to be a chef first, and then ask me
to make a specific recipe.
And lo and behold, that's a better result than if I just
ask it, hey, give me a recipe, because it
has the context around that.
So that was my first kind of delve into it.
I think if I look back, some of my first prompts, which
is only, I think I only really discovered it in January,
but some of my first prompts were
trying to use it for like planning a trick.
And quickly discovered that, oh, this is way better than doing
like 40 Google searches all at once.
Funny that you say that because I was getting back
into YouTube game, the first one I tried to,
as I think any YouTuber did for ChachiPT to write YouTube
titles, I was like, OK, I can give instructions,
make it less than 50 characters, make it catchy.
And then I so quickly realized that no,
it's the moment you put that YouTube titles, it goes,
oh, how to make money, guide, get rich.
And I was like, no, no, no.
So not flipping.
Yeah, so I was like, wait a second.
So this thing should be able to write way better things.
This is just me who is not giving proper instructions.
And actually, in the very beginning,
I made a video about ethics of AI.
And looking back, it is still an interesting video.
But looking back, I just simply asked,
oh, what do you think about ethics of AI?
Or what should we do?
What is the impact?
Now with the knowledge I have right now,
I know that I can completely influence those results.
And now I can use jailbreaks and really even get ChachiPT
to say some crazy things.
Yeah, yeah.
It is definitely a bit of a shift
from using it compared to a depth-first search model
or a page hit model like Google's algorithm is based on.
But I feel like since you and I might be categorized
as power users of this kind of tool right now,
let's rewind the tape a little bit
and talk about maybe what prompt engineering even is.
From today's Wikipedia entry, prompt engineering
is a concept in artificial intelligence,
particularly natural language processing.
In prompt engineering, the description of the task
that the AI is supposed to accomplish
is embedded in the input as a question
instead of being implicitly given.
Prompt engineering typically works by converting
one or more tasks into prompt-based datasets
and training the language model
with what has been called prompt-based learning
or just prompt learning.
All right, so a lot of fancier terms that you've never heard.
Allow me.
Yes, please, translate.
Allow me to translate this as,
explain me like I'm five or any normal human being
who is listening to this.
Prompt engineering is an art and a science in itself
of how to talk to AI or to large language models, if you may.
And I really like to use some references
that it's not what you say, it's how you say it.
And I think if you think about it,
if you have a conversation with a person
and you want this person to do something what you want.
So anybody who managed people, I think, in Relate
or anybody who had personal assistant or executive assistant,
the results you get is based on your instructions you provide.
If you give no input, you get very sloppy results.
And I experienced this as an architect
working with the clients.
And anybody who ever worked with graphical designers
would say exactly the same.
So coming with this background, this is my interpretation
or you can say generalization of what prompt engineering is.
I definitely agree with the art and science cross-section
because it would almost seem like just in your example there
that if you said, hey, I need to communicate
some instructions to one of my coworkers
or persuade them to do something, for example,
with prompt engineering and using some of these models,
you might want to say and think about,
okay, what makes an argument persuasive?
And using the resources, just searching on the internet
or even asking the AI, hey, what makes a good persuasive
argument and it tells you, then using that in the prompt,
hey, I need to convince someone of my position
based on this different website entry or this technique
I want you to use the persuasive argumentative style
and imagine that you're a master communicator
and debater.
So it's just, I think that the perfect cross-section
of it is where, yes, thinking about things
maybe a little algorithmically and as little components
in an equation is definitely one way that's helpful
but also having a completely outside the box perspective
into how things are communicated or how a certain piece
of art that if you want to generate something
in mid-journey, how that style gets assembled
is a, I think a really key and important piece.
You know what's funny outcome of all,
especially text to image, I noticed that a lot of people
learn more about art and art styles and artists.
And this is like one kind of benefit I noticed
that people search actively about different artists
in different times.
As someone who studied art history back in academia,
this is fascinating to see the same names and styles pop up
and now more people actually know about it.
I think that's quite cool.
You pulled Wikipedia, which is cool, it's fine,
but I want to pull Learn Prompting.
Maybe I'm just still, I'm still stuck in the past
a little bit.
No, no, Wikipedia, it's a classic, right?
But on learnprompting.org, prompt engineering
is the process of communicating effectively
with an AI to achieve desired results.
There you go.
Here you go.
And of course there is way more you can go into
and all the details, but I think this one sentence
so nicely also wraps it.
No, I completely agree.
And you probably noticed that G and I may not have
the exact same speaking intonation.
We're in fact across the world from one another,
but found each other just through that little discord
right there, the learnprompting.org discord.
I'm really glad you brought that up
because what I think you'll find,
especially with all of the different tools
that Facebook and Google, Instagram leverage
to put ads that are relevant to us in front of our faces.
If you make one Google search for chat GPT,
you might start getting advertisements
for Jeff's top 3000 chat GPT prompts.
You know, what I think is,
you look at Jeff's top 3000 GPT prompt emails.
You mean all these guides?
All these guides, quick reference, quick references
and some, hey, pay me $500 for that,
how to talk to AI course.
And then in two weeks, you pay me another 200.
The previous course is outdated
and now there is a new course.
The thing with learnprompting.org, it's open source
which means that it's live.
So community and people on GitHub updating all the time.
And Wes, I know you published an article there too, right?
Yep, our articles and our write-ups in there
is based on peer reviewed research.
Now, I don't know about you, G.
I can't imagine that the average bear
has a hundred page academic papers
on the latest how to talk to AI techniques
and their experiments on their nightstand.
And if they do, I'm sure they work
to put them right to sleep.
But the secret sauce of learnprompting
is we will take those and then digest them
much like a cow digest grass through the six or seven stomachs
that they have and make it somewhat more digestible,
somewhat more understandable.
But then rather than coming out at cow dung in the end,
oh, we're gonna take the time and effort and energy
to try to make this as broadly understandable as possible
because we're both very passionate about these tools
and what prompting can do for you in your life.
In that same vein, what has coming into prompt engineering
kind of done for you and shaped a little bit
of what you kind of wanna do in the future?
So just to rewind, first time I came across
learnprompting.org, this thing felt real.
Like it felt research backed.
And this is what I really wanted to also understand.
Not just, hey, this is a cool prompt,
use this prompt, that's it.
But I wanted to understand how to make these good prompts.
Right?
And this was because I was going through career shift
and I was about to look for jobs.
And my thinking was that, okay,
if I'm looking for a new job,
I need to get some competitive edge or upscale.
And I was learning about AI for like past years, right?
And I was like, okay, I'm going to learn this
and get involved in the community and contribute.
And I think Discord, and I could be wrong,
but I think when I joined Discord was like 350 people.
Now today in 2023, what we have March.
That was 30,000, I think.
Yes.
And it was like this small website
that one brilliant person, should we say?
Well, eventually we'll get Sander on here.
We'll have the spiritual leader
of the learnprompting movement.
We'll interview him and talk to him about his motivations.
But see, I think that's an interesting approach
where you would take,
hey, I'm going to learn everything about this.
To me, I would go, I'm going to use this
to write my cover letters.
So I don't have to write a thousand cover letters
as I apply for jobs.
Whole topic, I have personal opinion
about writing cover letters or resumes
or using your personal data and dumping it
in these type of tools.
We can definitely explore that.
But yeah, so learnprompting,
I got involved with the community,
started talking to Sanders and became contributor.
And then I decided to make YouTube videos
where I just share what I learned and what I'm doing.
So just basically get people on a journey.
And yeah, the rest is history.
My channel started getting a couple of views
and then we started talking
and just basically everything became crazy.
Now I'm scrapping time to keep learning,
to keep updating myself and also creating.
And I'm glad that we are doing this
because I'm receiving so many questions from people.
Just not scalable for me to answer it all.
Plus putting two minds and getting some guests
on this channel who are deep into these things as well.
I think it's going to be a fantastic medium.
Getting their perspectives just wonderfully beneficial,
but let that not be a barrier.
You don't need to be a computer science expert
or have some sort of certification
in natural language modeling or some fancy degree.
You need to, from where I sit,
you need two different things to be a prompt engineer
and use these tools really well,
even to the point where you can make a career
or make some money from them.
You need to have maybe probably done a Google search
or send a text message or written an email
because you will be writing into a little box
on the internet that is going to send it
to a large language model and give you a response back.
And then two, you need to just be a person
that's alive maybe and have had some different experiences,
insights and viewpoints in the world.
It's really just everyone's differences
that they can bring forth into a process
like prompt engineering that can give them
a bit of a competitive edge.
If you've been well traveled or well read
or just have certain kind of Joe DeVive
that can play into some really interesting
and creative results thanks to prompt engineering.
Funny thing, I don't know if you watched my video
about Mid Journey, but Mid Journey's founder,
he basically shared the interesting insight
that when we'd been doing user research,
and I'm here specifically Mid Journey,
so this was before ChaiGBT,
that what they found out that people who are older,
that older people, they communicate way better
what they want.
They have, we have experiences,
exactly what you were saying.
We have experiences, they lived life,
they have seen stuff and experienced stuff,
so they can actually put words to it,
just statistically probably read more books
than younger person.
So this is what's interesting that as for prompt engineering
that actually your age, you have an advantage
over a younger person.
Definitely, definitely.
That's just another data point in how this isn't a young,
tech savvy tool that you need to really be
on the cutting edge to use.
It's gonna really form a lot.
It's gonna transform anything,
and everybody has something to bring to the table.
So Wes, so I found learn prompting.
How did you found it?
And also what got you to this point?
Like where is the interest coming from
and how are you using all this knowledge
and your involvement with learn prompting?
And in general, I heard that you're one of the top sellers
on prompt base, right?
Well, you know, I'm up there,
but I'm flirting around top 200 in the world,
but that's just one little opportunity
that people can take advantage of right now.
You can put your compelling prompt
that gives you a travel itinerary
or something that produces a photorealistic bottle
in mid journey.
You can put those online on this website,
promptbase.com.
We'll put that in the description as well,
that you can sell between two and $20, two and $30,
or even offer custom prompts.
It's a great little way to make some passive income.
If you look at some of the top sellers on there right now,
they're on pace to make 80 to $100,000 in passive income
in selling 299, 399, 499 prompts.
This is amazing.
Not too expensive, but definitely speaks to the interest.
This isn't just something that, you know,
select group of people are gonna be interested in.
It's gonna touch every aspect of everyone's life
in some way.
But you asked, you know, how I got into this.
So I just finished a degree into operations research.
So I got initially exposed
to some machine learning principles,
and a lot of the building blocks
that go into making these large language models.
It was definitely in over my head in those classes,
but I recognized that, hey, this is a,
this is kind of like the key to the future.
I'm gonna try real hard to understand it a little bit,
and then take it from there.
But graduated, came and went on about my regular job,
regular life, and then Chad GPT came out.
And immediately, like I said,
soon as I put that first prompt in there,
I'm like, this is way different.
I can only, the only way I can describe it is,
is like, it must have been what it was like
for someone to see an airplane flying in the sky
for the first time, like back in the 1910s,
or something like that.
Or Google.
Or Google search, yeah.
It was that transformative to me,
and I immediately just started using it,
but I didn't have the context
beyond what we call zero-shot prompting now that I know,
but essentially the same kind of questions
I would throw into a Google search.
That's when I found, learned prompting,
saw that it was open source,
and I'm like, oh, I just finished two and a half years
of reading papers just like this.
I can maybe contribute something here.
So that's what I did.
And during that journey, and this is the thing that,
if I never talk about this or never do anything else
with prompting and prompt engineering and talking to AI,
why it's so special and important to me,
when you have a tool that can get you 75% of the way
on anything, on writing an email,
on coming up with new and fresh ideas
for your next YouTube video title,
on what you should eat for dinner tonight,
on where you should go during your trip, you know,
trip to Europe.
When you have something that you know
is gonna get you 75% of the way there,
at least for me, who's someone that is kind of constantly
thinking about how he's gonna communicate,
how he's gonna express himself,
that email I gotta write to my boss the next day.
With that gone, it frees up so much just like emotional
and intellectual like space in my life
that's allowed me to be more present with my family
and engaging with other people.
So while I can't say that's gonna be everyone's reaction
and response and experience when they do this,
it was for me and that's what,
and it's only just the beginning with so many of these things.
So that's how I came into it and why I know
it's gonna continue to be a big part of my life
and my journey.
This is amazing.
Thank you for sharing this.
No, absolutely.
Cause it can be anybody.
Everybody has something to offer in prop engineering.
If you're a good communicator and written,
auditory, in any form, something to offer.
I think with that, we want this to become something great,
something informative, something funny.
I don't know about you,
every time I click on a new AI video,
I feel like it's all gloom and doom are way above my head.
Is that been your experience?
Not with my videos.
I know, that's why I like it.
And that's why we're together.
No, this was actually my annoyance.
You can say that for almost like a year,
space on YouTube about AI turned into this,
get rich quick, use chat GPT, you are superhuman AI.
I was like, guys and girls, where is critical thinking?
Where is the rational thinking?
This is like life moves on.
And for me, this danger of sensationalism of AI,
because for most people who don't know what it is,
and they just hear something like that,
that either scares them,
or it makes them feel that this is a fraud.
And that's why I think having these conversations
and having this podcast allows aid for us
to have different perspectives
that we come from different backgrounds
and share more in-depth views
would wish this podcast to be relevant.
Because even researchers, AI researcher
doesn't mean is a good prompt engineer.
I really like what Sam Altman said,
that he's not a good prompt engineer.
Creates and the CEO of these tools.
Exactly, because going into this,
like you're doing your own research,
learning about prompts, testing, experimenting,
seeing what works, what not, like down to the word.
And I think it's an important point
you brought up right there where it's just,
hey, no one is an expert in this right now.
This is a term that's been used for six months.
There are no objective measures of prompt engineers.
So please don't think for a second
that you're gonna have all this wisdom and insight
by spending $199.99 on Jeff's top 3,000 bucks.
Because I'm dollars to donuts would bet
that he probably used Jack GPT to create most of us.
But I recognize though that, hey,
some people may not want to become really deeply involved
prompt engineers, but recognize
that there's a lot of value to be gained.
We can at least hopefully during these podcasts
offer some insights into how to find people
that know how to talk to AI and leverage it well,
or what questions you should be asking of your peers,
your employees of the AI itself to get to a point
where you can get it to do what you want from it.
This is a really good point because that internet
and especially social media, right?
Everyone heard that marketing, digital marketing,
if you want your products to be sold,
you need to be an influencer and stuff like that.
Mind you, not everybody needs to be a marketing expert.
That's why there are specific group of people
who will go in depth of how algorithms work,
how to position your product.
And it should be like that.
I was always also saying to my artist friends
who worry about business side, get a business partner.
Your job is to be an artist.
The moment artist cares and worries about how to earn money,
that changes the game.
So I think it's exactly the same that just because
there is this tools and AI tools,
not everybody needs to become an expert.
If you want to, you definitely can go that path.
But a lot of people, it just as using any other assistance,
they will use prompt engineering consultants,
they will be buying prompts.
It's just how it has always been.
Not everybody becomes an expert.
Yeah, and I think it can be used too.
It is not a strictly generative tool.
Hey, I need you to write this email for me.
I need you to work on this report for me.
Plenty of ethics to unpack with that one
as I'm sure this is gonna become a huge topic of discussion
if it's not already on every high school and college campus
considering the essay is now in jeopardy.
It is.
That's not to say that it should be something
that should be shunned.
We gave every student a calculator, however many years ago,
and we didn't then stop doing math.
We changed how we evaluated them.
The same can be said for prompt engineering.
I think it's a great exercise to go, yeah, use this tool,
but then you're gonna put your prompt
at the top of the essay.
I don't want you to come back and tell me about
how that worked out for you.
I'm still gonna grade it like I would any old essay,
and that in itself becomes
a really good critical thinking exercise.
Talking about critical thinking, one use case,
which is what you shared,
that for you it's freeing 75% of time
and removing this just basically stress and anxiety
when you have to write emails,
when you have to basically overthink.
The way I look at it is like literally I have
a personal assistant who can be honest.
Again, going back to my roots in academia
and with architecture, you want to have a professor.
The best professor is who never compliments your work.
You bring 100 ideas and he will tell how every
of those ideas could be better or what you can improve.
So for me, I noticed that most of the times
when I use Chai GPT for ideation or brainstorming
or writing, I use it to criticize me.
Well, criticize mode, which I made a video about,
but I use it in so many instances to basically challenge
my own bias or my own thinking, what I think is good.
And that allows me push boundaries
and then I can again run the same thing
and push even more and even more.
That's, it's almost just like a little stepping stone
to help me get to the next level.
And I think it can be that for a lot of people.
I'm sure you've heard and it's definitely a point like,
hey, this could be the end of creativity
and content creative thinking as we know it.
I disagree.
I think it's just gonna,
this is gonna take our creativity
to heights we could never achieve
because the stress of looking at a blank page
or an empty canvas, it isn't there anymore.
Like it's, okay, I know I have at least a jumping off point
and I can get something and have it do that output again.
And if I don't like it, or I could just say,
all right, I can work with this.
Let me just make some changes and go on to something
that you never even would have even considered.
Okay, so what can people expect from us?
Well, we hope to offer two perspectives,
hopefully unique ones in the sense that G and I
just try to hold on as tight as we can
to the breakneck pace of all things AI
and prompt engineering that gets thrown at us.
So we can offer that perspective in the sense
that we're a little more in the center of it.
It's all I seem to think about these days.
So we're gonna offer those two perspectives
that you can count on.
We hope to bring some interesting people
in the AI and prompt engineering world to bear
everything from people that are researching and building
and trying to push these models even more
into the future and removing biases
and refining them and making them better tools
to people that are just using prompts
in a very interesting way.
That is another thing we hope to offer you guys.
And to add on that, another aspect is that we would like
to make this podcast accessible both to prompt engineers
or aspiring people to go and explore deeper that field,
but also business owners, everyday people
who want to understand this and want to understand AI space,
but also where prompt engineers,
where these people play a role
in their business going forward.
So I received a lot of messages,
especially from business owners,
entrepreneurs, agency managers.
They understand that this is coming.
They understand that this is important,
but the question is how do you actually use it?
How do you implement it in everyday business?
How do you place this prompt engineer in your small agency
and what this person actually does?
So there's so much to explore from both perspectives
and bringing on this podcast, both prompt engineers
and matching them together with people
who could use such service in their day-to-day operations.
And having those two groups of people explore ideas
and have conversations, I think that would be really cool.
And therefore I think publishing this video on YouTube
is going to be cool to see comments.
But we're gonna have some fun with this too.
Like maybe we'll interview someone that's passed away
hundreds of years ago with the help of ChatGPT
and some of these text to voice tools
that are coming online.
A lot of our talk is gonna focus around ChatGPT,
Mid Journey, a lot of these generative AI models,
but we'll share some other tools and use cases,
both in the sense of different websites
that you can check out, take advantage of,
or different things that'll make you a better prompt engineer,
better user of these tools.
So basically, watch out for the third co-host
with quite synthetic voice.
There you go.
There may be, maybe some may feel
we'll be out of a job like that.
I say nay, it'll just make us better at what we do.
So with that folks, 4G across the way there,
go to go ourself across the ocean,
West the synth mine, we're gonna say ciao and bye for now.
Happy prompting everybody.
Take care.
Ciao.