Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
Specifying 'You are a careful systematic reviewer. List inclusion criteria first, then…' to structure an LLM literature triage
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Typing a single-word query into a chatbot is using an LLM but is not prompt engineering in the disciplined sense
Editorial commentary
For reproducibility in scholarly work, prompts that produced reported AI outputs should be archived alongside outputs. Prompt engineering is itself a human intellectual contribution that may merit acknowledgement when central to a result, but does not by itself confer authorship of AI-generated text.
References
- Wei et al. 2022 ‘Chain-of-Thought Prompting’ NeurIPS
- OpenAI Prompt Engineering Guide
Also known as
Prompt design · Prompting
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
xml
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="Prompt engineering"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/prompt-engineering" />json
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"name": "Prompt engineering",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/prompt-engineering",
"description": "The practice of designing, refining, and structuring input text given to a generative AI system in order to elicit specific desired outputs, including techniques such as role assignment, few-shot examples, chain-of-thought scaffolding, and output-format specification.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/generative-ai-use-and-disclosure/",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/prompt-engineering",
"sameAs": [
"Prompt design",
"Prompting"
],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
}
