On its surface, prompt engineering seems like entering in a prompt and receiving an output. It’s so much more. At its core prompting involves actively guiding the shape of the generative process; this requires a deep understanding of the interplay between form, content, and context to surface solutions from the chaotic neural network. Those familiar with quantitative and qualitative assessments know it’s not the question that inspires a good answer from a respondent; it’s how the question is phrased that matters. Prompts are prompts regardless of who or what they're posed to.
Consider the prompt as a seed - a kernel of meaning from which entire worlds may spring forth. The specific informational content encoded within the prompt is crucial of course. But equally important are the subtextual cues and frames evoked by the prompt's structure and style. Tone, perspective, implicit causality, embedded scripts and schemas - these narratological devices act as strange attractors, drawing the model's outputs towards particular archetypal story-spaces.
In this sense, I believe prompt engineering can be understood as a higher-order form of storytelling. (To be clear: by no means a 'higher form' of storytelling.) By deftly arranging and encoding these narratological touchstones, a savvy prompt engineer sculpts the contours of the storyworlds to unfold them downstream. Tweaking a word here, a tense there, can radically alter the phase space of narrative possibilities. With prompts as the control surface, language itself becomes the medium to be molded. Language as form is not a new concept. Poets and lawyers know this fact well.
But the model too plays an active role in this dance of co-creation. Its latent knowledge, proclivities, and attentional dynamics intermingle with the prompt in nonlinear ways forming a complex tangle of feedforward and feedback processes. Excavating the shape of this possibility space is the great challenge - and great wonder - of the prompt engineer's art.
From above,
emerges below
Much remains to be mapped in this new frontier of generative storytelling. Or, perhaps it's best described as looming. (Yes. Loom. Like for weaving!) But I believe that by deeply engaging with questions of narratological synergetics - by developing a rigorous yet intuitive feel for the interplay of prompts, models, and the evanescent patterns of meaning that flicker between them - we can begin to master the subtle aspects of the craft. We can learn to channel the living currents of language, shaping them ever more deftly to evoke the stories we wish to tell.
Of course, this barely scratches the surface! I could go on at length about the implications for computational creativity, for the evolution of narrative forms, for language itself. Through understanding the fundamentals of neural networks a prompt engineer can interact with any interface: be it business or artful ends and produce valuable results.
But perhaps it's best to hit pause for now. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the matter! What are your thoughts on the synergetics of prompts and stories?
Does an image spring to mind? What story would you like to tell in images?
Share a description below and I'll make a unique generation just for you!
Prompt Wizards. There. Doubled down on the SEO thing.
And I'll drop a teaser why not. Prompt engineer for now. AI engineer in the future. Chipping away at my own model based on my photography that'll be ready to show some day.
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