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What is prompting in Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
What does prompting mean? Learn about the core technologies in this intro to AI and prompting article.
Intro to Prompting
Artificial Intelligence - AI
Hot terms like "neural networks," "machine learning," and above all - AI - can lead to confusion about what's behind this emerging technology, and where it really matters. Nearly every application or digital tool these days claims to utilize "AI technology" - but what really is AI?
Unlike other computer programs, real artificial intelligence uses a technique called "modeling." Modeling refers to when a computer program looks at a large set of data and "learns" about the attributes of that data so that it can reproduce similar data in the future.
Understanding AI
How AI Works
Once provided a dataset to analyze and model, AI can then reproduce "new" content based on that model. For example, when provided a large dataset of cat images, an AI can determine the key attributes of a cat - such as the tail, small ears, and four feet. At the same time, the image AI can be provided a dataset of mice and determine what are the essential parts of a mouse.
Once the AI understands the core components of a cat and mouse, then it's ready to work for you. You can ask it to make a painting of a green mouse smiling at an unhappy cat, and it can do that with little effort. Note that in this example, the AI also knew what green is, what a smile is, how to make a cat look "unhappy," and what makes an image look like it was painted. All of these things - and many more - exist in the model and are just waiting for your prompt to bring them out.
Key AI Concept - Prompting
The request you make to the AI in written words is known as a "prompt." The process of choosing what words to use in your prompt is known as "prompting." One difference between AI prompting and a traditional Google search is that adding more and more detail to your AI prompt should produce an image more and more like what you desire since the AI is "making" your prompt. On the contrary, Google images is simply looking for an already-existing image that matches your search query.
Prompting has become more and more of a science since groundbreaking AI tools were released to the general public in 2022, and many now use the term "prompt engineer" to describe people who are good at creating AI prompts. It should also be noted though, that AI can actually write prompts for you (the language AI ChatGPT can write prompts for the image AI program Midjourney), although prompting techniques can also be highly specific to a certain AI (adding "ar -16:9" is a specific prompting command to tell Midjourney to create your image in the 16:9 aspect ratio).
Learn AI with Mastr.AI
Learn Prompting and AI Tools
If you're interested in learning prompting techniques and how to use AI tools, consider taking an AI certification course with us. Our AI courses all include a certification, and they make AI just as simple as this article.
Wondering whether an AI wrote this article? It just so happens, there are tools to detect whether writing was made by an AI. But guess what - there are also AI tools to make AI outputs undetectable by AI-detection tools. We cover all these tools in our AI marketing class, our AI writing course, and other AI classes we provide.
While this page was 100% written by a human rather than artificial intelligence, you won't be disappointed to learn that the below image was made by the AI image tool Midjourney (learn Midjourney in our graphic design certification course). Becuase what could be better at making a photorealistic 3D image of a happy cow riding on the back of a t-rex wearing a santa costume in outer space?
