Digital foundations and emerging technologies

Prompting is when you give instructions to an AI tool, such as Microsoft Copilot chat or ChatGPT. It works best if you treat it like a conversation.

Top tips when chatting to GenAI assistants:

1. Always start a new chat window when you want to talk to the GenAI tool about a new topic. That way, if you share the output links with anyone (e.g. as part of an assignment submission), they'll only be able to see your conversation about that specific topic.

2. Don't input confidential, personal, or sensitive information.

3. It's a good idea to amend your privacy settings within the AI tool, and/ or turn off your chat history so that information you input cannot be saved and used to train AI models. Get more information on this in the Copyright Toolkit.

AI is rapidly evolving, and so is the art of prompting. Developing strong prompting skills will help you generate more relevant, accurate, and useful outputs. Watch the quick video to learn some techniques to get the best results when prompting:

Optional activity:

1. Think of a task that is appropriate to do with the help of GenAI.

2. Open your preferred AI assistant (e.g. Microsoft Copilot Chat) and write a prompt that includes the 4 key elements:

3. Review the output. What's good about it? What needs improving? 

4. Try to improve the output by reiterating: ask follow-up questions, get the AI assistant to provide examples, or change tone or format.

5. Reflect on the following questions: What was helpful? What was unhelpful? How will you refine your prompting skills in future?

Confident you know the fundamentals of prompting Large Language Models (LLMs) like Microsoft Copilot chat or ChatGPT? Check out these more advanced tips to get next level outputs from your favoured LLM:

Review what we've covered on this page by taking this quick quiz.

Want to learn more? Register for the 'Crafting Clever Prompts' workshop.