Re: Prompt Engineering (reader)

I take issue with the term "prompt engineering"because it somehow implies creating a "well formed query"that "prompts" a "well formed input format" leading to an output within the range of scope and intention of the well formed query.
But natural language is tricky, and as a polyglot I can assure you that you can make any chatbot hallucinate by language blending.
I remember from my university days how as a mathematician I had conversations with philosophers and language students about this language blending, which is in short is combining common grammatical constructs but in one language switching to to idiomatic styles of another, change tonality and in some cases word order not unlike in poetry.
Current literature on polyglots shows they have cognitive skills to better cope with bias and rational thinking.
Unfortunately Big Internet and AI tech is monolinguistic and does not want to address these and other linguistic issues.
Prompt engineering is what we would normally consider part of human computer interaction, and the vast body of scientific literature shows that between computational linguistics and generative AI using large language models lies a field of categories of statistical natural language modeling with inherent biases.
We are still decades away from having a C3PO robot versed in all 7,000 plus human languages.
Natural language is multiple contexts sensitive and IMHO current state of the art generative AI doesn't come close to dealing with this, hence the "prompt engineering" term is catchy but technically nonsense.

Milton Ponson
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    On Saturday, December 30, 2023 at 05:16:20 AM AST, Paola Di Maio <paola.dimaio@gmail.com> wrote:  
 
 We received fun intelligent (pseudo intelligent?) generative demos on this list (by Dave R)  that show output, but did not describe the prompts. I asked about the prompt and received no reply(recursive empty prompt vector?)
Prompt Engineering is a thing (but it is not new)
Good article: https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-write-better-chatgpt-prompts/READ AND DISCUSS
There is however new emphasis on Generative AI and Natural Language that moves the field on from SQL and the likeswhich is interesting and, dare I say, important

I may be able to share some lecture notes
Happiest possible year given the sodden circumstances the world is 


PDM