🟢 Role Prompting

Another prompting technique is to assign a role to the AI. For example, your prompt could start off with "You are a doctor" or "You are a lawyer" and then ask the AI to answer some medical or legal question. Here is an example:

You are a brilliant mathematician who can solve any problem in the world.
Attempt to solve the following problem:

What is 100*100/400*56?

The answer is 1400.

The AI's (GPT-3 davinci-003) answer is highlighted in green:

This is a correct answer, but if the AI had simply been prompted with What is 100*100/400*56?, it would have answered 280 (incorrect).

When assigning a role to the AI, we are giving it some context. This context helps the AI understand the question better. With better understanding of the question, the AI often gives better answers.

Notes

This technique is no longer as effective with more modern AIs (e.g. GPT-3 davinci-003). However, I did use GPT-3 davinci-003 for this example, so it seems that role prompting is still at least a somewhat effective tool.

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