Artificial Intelligence: For Students
5 Guidelines for a Good Prompt
- Use correct spelling and grammar. Write complete sentences.
- Be clear, specific and detailed about your request to the AI.
- Provide context and perspective to focus the AI output.
- Break down complex tasks into multiple short prompts.
- Specify the desired format, tone and style of the output.
Basic prompt formula Declare a [ROLE]. Give [CONTEXT]. Create a [TASK] and specify [FORMAT].
Example
You are a college student. You are taking a political science course and writing a 1,500-word essay on the topic of disinformation in modern societies. Please produce a potential outline for the essay, suggesting key points to cover and possible sources to research. Cite the sources for your response.
Text from "A student guide to navigating college in the artificial intelligence era" by Elon University under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 International License 
CLEAR Prompts
CLEAR stands for Concise, Logical, Explicit, Adaptive, and Reflective. See the instructions and examples in the table below for how you can use CLEAR as a way to craft effective prompts.
Concise, Logical, and Explicit address how to craft your initial prompt:
| Good | Needs Improvement | |
|---|---|---|
|
Concise (and Clear) Focus on the key words you’re prompting the AI tool to analyze and be as specific as possible. |
Prompt: "Plan a two-week vacation to Italy in June 2024. All travel will be by train between Rome, Florence and Siena starting and ending in Rome. Plan an itinerary for each city that includes 3 museums and 3 parks to visit in each city." | Prompt: "I want to travel to Italy" |
|
Logical Make sure your prompt presents the concepts accurately and in a natural or rational order. |
Prompt: "Summarize the most promising solutions for developing ocean wind farms." |
Prompt: "Can we make vitamins organically?" Are you asking about a vitamin made with organic materials or developed using an organic process? Or other? If your question doesn’t make sense to you or others, it might not make sense to AI. |
|
Explicit Be clear about what you want from the AI. |
Prompt: "Give me a concise summary of the major strengths and weaknesses of electric vehicles." |
Prompt: "Tell me about electric vehicles?" What's your comparison for electric vehicles? Do you want a short answer or a long one? Giving the AI tool clear output directions can help the AI produce an answer that is useful to you. |
Even the best prompts may need improvement. Adaptive and Reflective address what to do after you’ve examined the AI’s answer to your initial prompt:
|
Adaptive Try a second prompt with keywords or topics suggested by the AI in its answer. |
Prompt 1: Why don’t we have more tunnels going between Manhattan and New Jersey? AI Answer: [includes "geological obstacles"] Prompt 2: What are the engineering challenges and geological obstacles to constructing more tunnels between Manhattan and New Jersey? |
|
Reflective Does the answer make sense? Does the answer refer to current research (if important), or does it seem based on older research? Has the AI “hallucinated” or returned inaccurate information? Is the answer complete, or are there perspectives or voices unrepresented in the answer? You may need to craft additional prompts that specifically target gaps in the initial answer. |
Prompt 1: Give me a concise summary of the major strengths and weaknesses of solar panels. Prompt 2: Give me a concise summary of the major strengths and weaknesses of solar panels from the perspective of someone living in Portland, OR versus someone living in Phoenix, AZ. |
Read more about the CLEAR framework in Lo, L. S. (2023). The CLEAR path: A framework for enhancing information literacy through prompt engineering. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 49(4), 102720–. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2023.102720
Table adapted from "How to Craft Prompts - Artificial Intelligence (Generative) Resources" by Georgetown University under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Bias and Tone in Prompting
In addition to CLEAR prompting, there are a few other things to remember when you approach an AI chatbot. What you put into the chatbot reflects what you will get out of it:
- Bias in prompting can lead to bias in results. The University of Waterloo has a set of examples of the potential for bias in ChatGPT's outputs based on the prompts provided.
- There has been some research suggesting that impolite prompts can negatively impact the performance of chatbots, as outlined in "Should We Respect LLMs? A Cross-Lingual Study on the Influence of Prompt Politeness on LLM Performance" (Yin et al., 2024). Read varied perspectives on this issue more in the Axios article "Being nice to chatbots pays off" and a Medium post by Nathan Bos, PhD., called "Do I need to be polite to my LLM?"
High-Level Prompting
You can design higher-level prompts that guide the AI in how it generates answers and meets your needs.
Examples
Suggest some prompts for me to use to ask you about the concepts of misinformation and its impact on society.
I have some questions about cell biology. Please start with a brief, straightforward explanation suitable for beginners. Follow up with a more detailed explanation and provide real-world examples to illustrate key points. Encourage me to ask follow-up questions and challenge me with questions to test my understanding.
I am going to provide a series of scenarios about the ways AI may impact society in the future. For each scenario, please provide three different perspectives: optimistic, pessimistic and neutral.
Text from "A student guide to navigating college in the artificial intelligence era" by Elon University under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 International License
AI Tools in Focus
ChatGPT is a chatbot designed to mimic human interaction through text, voice, or (in the subscription-based ChatGPT Plus) images. It uses AI systems to generate, edit, and iterate with users on a variety of writing and thinking tasks, providing knowledge of information through April 2023, for Plus, or January 2022, for the free version (it is not connected to current internet data). It offers GPTs customized for a single purpose, such as creative writing or math tutoring. ChatGPT has known limitations, including social biases, hallucinations, and adversarial prompts.
Librarian Resource: Tony Iodice and Casey Hampsey
ChatPDF is a research assistant that allows users to upload PDF documents and use the chat function to ask research questions, summarize the article’s contents, describe images and figures, and otherwise use a chat function to better understand documents. ChatPDF allows for PDFs to be more easily read by, e.g., a screen reader, and offers folders to sort and group documents and chat with multiple files at once. The free version of the site allows up to 2 PDFs to be uploaded per day, and up to 20 chat questions to be asked. The paid version allows unlimited PDFs, and unlimited interfacing with the chat.
Librarian Resource: Casey Hampsey
Consensus is an AI-powered academic search engine that is best suited for queries centered around a particular research topic or question. Using research papers from the Semantic Scholar database, Consensus offers summaries of individual papers and topic-level conclusions to answer your questions. The tool also provides generative-AI functions through its Consensus Copilot feature.
Librarian Resource: Sarah Barlow-Ochshorn
Microsoft Copilot Pro is an AI chatbot that can be searched as a standalone tool or alongside web Office 365. It offers different conversation styles, generates content, and interacts with user-uploaded images. Copilot uses both an internal knowledge base and internet data.
Librarian Resource: Natalka Sawchuk
Perplexity.ai is an alternative to traditional internet search engines such as Google or Bing. Instead of simply retrieving a list of webpages, Perplexity summarizes a selection of relevant sites to answer users’ questions, providing links to the sites along with images and/or videos. Users can then finetune their searches by asking follow-up questions. Additional features for paid subscribers include the ability to upload 100 files per day, generate images, conduct more thorough searches, and changing the text output.
Librarian Resource: Diana Kiel
Discover, cite, and manage scholarly resources with Petal. When you ask questions in natural language, Petal's AI can explain your selection, translate it into another language, or identify key points. Organize your papers using tags and folders to create a centralized knowledge base and collaborate with classmates by sharing documents and annotations. Access more features, such as citation lists, exports, multi-document chat, AI Table, and AI Create, with the paid plan.
Librarian Resource: Darcy Kaye