The first post in this prompt engineering series was a basic introduction to five popular chatbots – OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and Perplexity AI. It featured several simple text and image-based prompts and responses to demonstrate their basic capabilities generating text and images. This post is about learning to write simple, complex, and hypercomplex prompts using them.
Note: The responses below weren’t validated for factual accuracy since the focus was on composing prompts.
Crafting Prompts
When you’re creating prompts, think about them like instructions. A simple prompt will contain 1-3 different instructions or commands. A complex prompt will contain 3-5 commands. Anything above 5 is a hypercomplex prompt. Each instruction is a command or request asking the chatbot to do something.
Chatbots can handle prompts on various topics, including business, coding, science, personal advice, and academics. The examples will be demonstrated using Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot.
Individual instructions don’t have to be complex. They can include output format requirements, the type of content, what analysis has to be done, and the lenght of each response. It all depends on the end goal.
Simple Prompts
Simple prompts are prompts that tend to be vague or nonspecific. They contain little to no instructions. The instructions, if any, can be easy or difficult. If the instructions are unclear or confusing, the chatbots will make a best-guess interpretation or request additional information. If the instructions are inadequate or incomplete, the chatbot will let you know with a brief explanation of why it can’t respond.
In the following prompt, there are two instructions. The first is to find out how much money his uncle will make in the first year. The second is to understand how long it will take to start making money. All other content is the scenario or context.
Simple prompt:
My uncle who lives in the UK wants to start his own diary farm with these 12 cows. Before he decides he wants to understand how much money he will make in the first year and how long will it take him to start making money. The current owner says that each cow produces 8,100 liters of milk and is asking for $2,000 per cow.
Simple response:
That sounds like an exciting venture for your uncle! Let's break down the potential earnings and costs to give him a clearer picture.
### Potential Earnings:
1. **Milk Production**: Each cow produces 8,100 liters of milk per year.
2. **Milk Price**: The average farm-gate milk price in the UK is **45.17 pence per litre**.
3. **Total Milk Production**: 12 cows * 8,100 liters = 97,200 liters of milk per year.
4. **Total Earnings**: 97,200 liters * 45.17 pence = **£43,857.40** per year.
### Initial Costs:
1. **Purchase of Cows**: 12 cows * $2,000 = **$24,000**.
2. **Other Costs**: Land, equipment, insurance, feed, veterinary care, etc. These costs can vary widely, but let's assume an additional **$30,000** for the first year.
### Break-Even Analysis:
1. **Total Initial Investment**: $24,000 (cows) + $30,000 (other costs) = **$54,000**.
2. **Break-Even Point**: $54,000 / $43,857.40 = **1.23 years**.
So, your uncle can expect to start making a profit after approximately **1.23 years**, assuming all other costs are covered and milk prices remain stable.
Does this help clarify things for him?
Complex Prompts
Complex prompts contain 3-5 instructions with or without reference text or context. The individual instructions can be simple or difficult. The reference text is a text snippet that’s included with the prompt that the model has to use to create a response.
This prompt contains three instructions. The first is to provide a list of similar stories already published. The second is to find a similar movie script. The third is to create a list of potential book titles.
Complex prompt:
Before I get started, give me a list of similar stories already published so I don’t copy anyone else’s work. Also, find a movie script that’s similar to my idea. Oh, and give me a list of potential book titles.Complex response:
That sounds like a chilling and intriguing concept for a horror novel! Here are some similar stories and a movie script that might inspire you:
### Similar Stories:
1. **"Baby Teeth" by Zoje Stage** - This novel features a young girl with a sinister side, causing distress to her family.
2. **"The Bad Seed" by William March** - A classic tale of a seemingly innocent child who harbors a malevolent nature.
3. **"The Other" by Thomas Tryon** - This story involves identical twins, one of whom is evil.
4. **"The Push" by Ashley Audrain** - A psychological thriller about a mother's fear that her daughter is evil.
5. **"Let's Go Play at the Adams'" by Mendal W. Johnson** - A short story about a child's disturbing behavior.
### Movie Script:
You might find the movie **"The Omen" (1976)** interesting, as it features a creepy child antagonist with supernatural elements. The film revolves around a couple who adopt a child who turns out to be the Antichrist.
### Potential Book Titles:
1. **"The Face of Innocence"**
2. **"Eyes of the Old Soul"**
3. **"The Haunting of Baby Jack"**
4. **"The Curse of the Ancient Eyes"**
5. **"Beneath the Innocent Smile"**
I hope these suggestions help you get started on your novel! Do you have any specific elements or themes you want to explore further?
Hypercomplex prompts
Prompts with 5+ instructions and/or involve complex calculations and analyses that can challenge the chatbot are hypercomplex. If the prompt is too complex, the chatbot could create a partial response, return an incorrect one, or a combination of both.
If the complex prompt does not return the results you want, the best advice is to break it up into multiple complex or basic prompts that can be sequenced to get the desired response.
Note that Copilot has a 10,240-character (1,500-word) prompt limit. This is a hypercomplex prompt with a scenario and reference text. There are five instructions in this prompt. Several are complex and combining them creates a hypercomplex prompt.
Hypercomplex prompt:
You are a pop culture AI reporter writing an article for People Magazine and also preparing to do a follow-up interview with the documentarian Ken Burns. In this task you are to summarize the following transcript of Burns' commencement speech in three paragraphs totaling no more than 300 words. Follow that summary with a list of 5 numbered questions that you will use to probe what Burns believes were the five most important takeaways he was trying to provide for the audience of graduating seniors. Conclude with one more brief paragraph that explains whether or not it was appropriate to include a political observation about the upcoming election in the speech and why:
[begin text below]
Brandeisian, love it.
President Liebowitz, Ron, Chair Lisa Kranc, and other members of the board of trustees, Provost Carol Fierke, fellow honorees, distinguished faculty and staff, proud and relieved parents, calm and serene grandparents, distracted but secretly pleased siblings, ladies and gentlemen, graduating students of the class of 2024, good morning.
I am deeply honored and privileged that you have asked me here to say a few words at such a momentous occasion that you might find what I have to say worthy of your attention on so important a day in all of your lives. Thank you for this honor.
Listen, I am in the business of history. It is not always a happy subject on college campuses these days, particularly when forces seem determined to eliminate or water down difficult parts of our past, particularly when the subject may seem to sum an anachronistic and irrelevant pursuit, and particularly with the ferocious urgency this moment seems to exert on us. It is my job, however, to remind people of the power our past also exerts, to help us better understand what's going on now with compelling story, memory, and anecdote. It is my job to try to discern patterns and themes from history to enable us to interpret our dizzying and sometimes dismaying present.
For nearly 50 years now, I have diligently practiced and rigorously tried to maintain a conscious neutrality in my work, avoiding advocacy if I could, trying to speak to all of my fellow citizens. Over those many decades I've come to understand a significant fact, that we are not condemned to repeat, as the saying goes, what we don't remember. That is a beautiful, even poetic phrase, but not true. Nor are there cycles of history as the academic community periodically promotes. The Old Testament, Ecclesiastes to be specific, got it right, I think. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again. There is nothing new under the sun. What those lines suggest is that human nature never changes or almost never changes. We continually superimpose that complex and contradictory human nature over the seemingly random chaos of events, all of our inherent strengths and weaknesses, our greed and generosity, our puritanism and our prurience, our virtue, and our venality parade before our eyes, generation after generation after generation. This often gives us the impression that history repeats itself. It does not. "No event has ever happened twice, it just rhymes," Mark Twain is supposed to have said. I have spent all of my professional life on the lookout for those rhymes, drawn inexorably to that power of history. I am interested in listening to the many varied voices of a true, honest, complicated past that is unafraid of controversy and tragedy, but equally drawn to those stories and moments that suggest an abiding faith in the human spirit, and particularly the unique role this remarkable and sometimes also dysfunctional republic seems to play in the positive progress of mankind.
During the course of my work, I have become acquainted with hundreds if not thousands of those voices. They have inspired, haunted, and followed me over the years. Some of them may be helpful to you as you try to imagine and make sense of the trajectory of your lives today.
Listen, listen. In January of 1838, shortly before his 29th birthday, a tall, thin lawyer prone to bouts of debilitating depression addressed the young men's lyceum in Springfield, Illinois. "At what point shall we expect the approach of danger?" He asked his audience, "Shall we expect some trans-Atlantic military giant to step the earth and crush us at a blow?" Then he answered his own question. "Never. All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we must live through all time or die by suicide." It is a stunning, remarkable statement, one that has animated my own understanding of the American experience since I first read it more than 40 years ago. That young man was of course Abraham Lincoln, and he would go on to preside over the closest this country has ever come to near national suicide, our civil war, and yet embedded in his extraordinary, disturbing, and prescient words is also a fundamental optimism that implicitly acknowledges the geographical forcefield two mighty oceans east and west and two relatively benign neighbors north and south have provided for us since the British burned the White House in the War of 1812 and inspired Francis Scott Key.
Lincoln's words that day suggest what is so great and so good about the people who happen to inhabit this lucky and exquisite country of ours. That's the world you now inherit: our work ethic and our restlessness, our innovation and our improvisation, our communities and our institutions of higher learning, our suspicion of power. The fact that we seem resolutely dedicated to parsing the meaning between individual and collective freedom; What I want versus what we need. That we are all so dedicated to understanding what Thomas Jefferson really meant when he wrote that mysterious phrase, "The pursuit of happiness". Hint, it happens right here in the lifelong learning and perpetual improvement this university is committed to.
But the isolation of those two oceans has also helped to incubate habits and patterns less beneficial to us: our devotion to money and guns and conspiracies, our certainty about everything, our stubborn insistence on our own exceptionalism blinding us to that which needs repair, especially with regard to race and ethnicity. Our preoccupation with always making the other wrong at an individual as well as a global level. I am reminded of what the journalist I.F. Stone once said to a young acolyte who was profoundly disappointed in his mentor's admiration for Thomas Jefferson. "It's because history is tragedy," Stone admonished him, "Not melodrama." It's the perfect response. In melodrama all villains are perfectly villainous and all heroes are perfectly virtuous, but life is not like that. You know that in your guts and nor is our history like that. The novelist, Richard Powers recently wrote that, "The best arguments in the world," — and ladies and gentlemen, that's all we do is argue — "the best arguments in the world," he said, "Won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story." I've been struggling for most of my life to do that, to try to tell good, complex, sometimes contradictory stories, appreciating nuance and subtlety and undertow, sharing the confusion and consternation of unreconciled opposites.
But it's clear as individuals and as a nation we are dialectically preoccupied. Everything is either right or wrong, red state or blue state, young or old, gay or straight, rich or poor, Palestinian or Israeli, my way or the highway. Everywhere we are trapped by these old, tired, binary reactions, assumptions, and certainties. For filmmakers and faculty, students and citizens, that preoccupation is imprisoning. Still, we know and we hear and we express only arguments, and by so doing, we forget the inconvenient complexities of history and of human nature. That, for example, three great religions, their believers, all children of Abraham, each professing at the heart of their teaching, a respect for all human life, each with a central connection to and legitimate claim to the same holy ground, violate their own dictates of conduct and make this perpetually contested land a shameful graveyard. God does not distinguish between the dead. "Could you?"
Hypercomplex response:
Ken Burns' commencement speech at Brandeis University was a profound reflection on the importance of history and its relevance to our present and future. He emphasized the power of history to help us understand current events through compelling stories, memories, and anecdotes. Burns highlighted the idea that history does not repeat itself but rather rhymes, suggesting that human nature remains constant while events unfold in unique ways. He urged the graduates to listen to the many voices of the past, which can provide valuable insights as they navigate their own lives.
Burns also discussed the dual nature of American society, celebrating its strengths such as innovation, community, and a commitment to lifelong learning, while also acknowledging its flaws, including a devotion to money, guns, and conspiracies. He pointed out the dangers of binary thinking and the importance of appreciating the complexities and nuances of history and human nature. Burns used the example of Abraham Lincoln's speech to illustrate the idea that the greatest threats to a nation often come from within, and he encouraged the graduates to be mindful of this as they move forward.
In his speech, Burns touched on the current political climate, noting the upcoming election and the polarized state of the nation. He argued that understanding history and telling good, complex stories can help bridge divides and foster a more nuanced understanding of the world. Burns' inclusion of a political observation was appropriate as it underscored the relevance of historical awareness in addressing contemporary issues. By connecting past and present, he provided the graduates with a framework for thinking critically about the challenges they will face in the future.
Here are five questions to probe Burns' key takeaways:
1. What do you believe is the most important lesson history can teach us about understanding our present?
2. How can graduates apply the concept of history "rhyming" rather than repeating in their daily lives?
3. In what ways do you think binary thinking limits our ability to address complex issues?
4. How can storytelling help bridge the divide in our polarized society?
5. What role do you believe historical awareness plays in fostering a more inclusive and understanding community?
Including a political observation in Burns' speech was appropriate because it highlighted the direct connection between historical awareness and contemporary political issues. By addressing the upcoming election, Burns emphasized the importance of understanding the past to navigate the present and future effectively. This connection reinforced the relevance of his message and provided the graduates with a practical application of the lessons he shared.
Follow-up prompts
Follow-up prompts can be used to clarify, add detail to, or modify prior instructions. A chatbot should remember what was said in previous conversation rounds, but that is not a guarantee. You may have to ‘remind’ it about what was discussed in previous rounds to keep the conversation on track.
Other advice
Here’s some additional general advice to keep in mind when using a chatbot for technical writing. These are inexhaustive.
- If the conversation topic changes, start a new conversation. This will reduce the chatbot’s risk of forgetting previous conversation rounds.
- Brainstorming prompts can be made complex. They are good for offering different perspectives and ideas that have not been considered. They are a good starting point for new ideas.
- It may be better to start a conversation with a simple, general prompt in the first conversation round to see what the chatbot says. If it’s successful add complexity to subsequent prompts.
- Your prompts do not have to contain correct grammar. The chatbots will work with any punctuation you do or don’t include. They are good at understanding your intent from a bad prompt.
- If your prompt will be long or complex and requires line breaks or formatting, compose it in a text editor. This is because most chatbots treat the return keystroke as a send message, not a new line. This way, you can control the prompt’s format by inserting line breaks and bullet points, for example. If you compose them in a separate note, you can modify them or keep track of which ones have been used.
Conclusion
This post discusses crafting effective prompts for chatbots, categorizing them into simple (1-3 instructions), complex (3-5 instructions with or without reference text), and hypercomplex (5+ instructions or complex analyses). Hypercomplex prompts can challenge chatbots, requiring breaking them down into simpler prompts.
We used Microsoft Copilot to demonstrate examples, including a simple prompt about a dairy farm’s profitability, a complex prompt for a horror novel idea, and a hypercomplex prompt based on a Ken Burns. The advice included using follow-up prompts for clarification, starting a new conversation for new topics, and composing long prompts in a text editor for format and layout control.
The examples for creating simple, complex, and hypercomplex prompts should give you the tools to use a chatbot for technical writing projects. This overview of five popular chatbots demonstrats a small portion of what chatbots can do.
About the author
Renise is the owner and manager of Visually Written, a technical writing and communication company. She offers a range of technical writing services including API documentation and other technical documents.
