The OpenAI’s software platform, “ChatGPT” (Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) released in the end of November 2022 is a ‘Chatbot’ that uses both Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). This new ChatBot uses an innovative and new interface for its Large Language Model (LLM); LLM is a type of AI algorithm that uses deep learning techniques and massively large data sets to understand, summarize, generate and predict new content. Hence, ChatGPT can be termed as a, natural language processing tool driven by AI technology that allows the user to have human-like conversations and much more with the chatbot. The language model can answer questions and assist the user with tasks, such as composing emails, essays, and code. This new application (ChatGPT) which is available on the web is currently open to use by the public for free. A paid subscription version called ChatGPT Plus was launched at the beginning of February 2023 and the same is also in use as on date.
The company OpenAI is also the owner and promoter of DALL-E 2, which is a popular AI art generator, and Whisper, an automatic speech recognition system. Both this software is also available as Paid and Free version. While there is still concern about the rise of artificial intelligence, and also the related AI tools such as ChatGPT, yet the evolution of this new Generative Structure has enabled real life usage and dependency on AI tools. The popularity of this new revolutionary platform, and also driven the software giants, like Microsoft, Google, etc to invest and encourage the use of Ai in their existing applications and utilities. This again has also provided the essential push in generating high-paying jobs.
As per latest reports in the industry, the emergence of a new role called ‘Prompt Programmers’ has now propped up with the increase of AI. These ‘Prompt Engineers’, and said to have reached an 8 (eight) figure per annum salary in rupees, especially due to the non-availability of the skilled manpower and the on-the-job demand of such professionals. The qualification for such job is non-quantifiable and the domain knowledge and the social acumen is what is most essential. These professionals do not require any engineering or technical experience, and should primarily be a person who is able to train the model that is specific to a particular field (like a lawyer, a teacher, a space scientist, etc..).
What exactly does a prompt engineer do?
The ChatGPT is an artificially trained responder, the permutations of the queries need to be handled intelligently, and this ‘all possibilities’ need to be preloaded in the responder. The tool is a natural language processing utility and is also required to respond to human conversations. This training of the model, has to be done by a human only. A prompt engineer is someone who writes queries for prose that AI tools and chatbots can use to try and better their responses. Hence, the companies that offer these AI services need quick programmers who need not know coding or such languages, but need to provide prose, and also skilled in the domain, in all the possible legible combinations. As the Open AI CEO, Mr Sam Altman had tweeted just after the launch where in he was quoted as: “writing a really great prompt for a chatbot persona is an incredibly high leverage skill.”
Who can be a prompt engineer?
Anyone who knows how a language works, can be a prompt engineer. Prompt engineers don’t create software code; instead, they use plain English to elicit the best answers from an AI model and then figure out how it works. The act is mostly ‘wordplay’, hence one will often find prompt engineers coming from a history, philosophy, or English language background. The engineer attempts to condense the substance or meaning of something into a small number of lines, as part of training the model.
Is becoming a ‘prompt engineer’ the way to save your job from AI?
In the recent past, there were predictions that artificial intelligence would cause seven million job losses globally. This convincing technology has made ‘ChatGPT the smartest chatbot ever made. ChatGPT is now being used to generate white papers, writeups, Research Paters, high-school essays, software code or marketing strategies within seconds, all from a few words of a “prompt”. The timelines that were prevailing have been filling up with people trying out this technology. ChatGPT’s results are not always reliable or accurate. Nonetheless, the advent of this technology has raised eyebrows and also making the middle-management becoming a creative class, without their subordinates. The work culture of organisation is now undergoing a change, with the ‘job loss’ being a factor that is a reason to be worried upon. Yet, one role that has emerged with the rise of generative AI is the “prompt engineer”. This job description sees writing the prompts necessary to get the best responses from AIs as a opportunity. Wrangling ChatGPT requires a deeper understanding of how AI works — hence “engineer” — as well as domain expertise, is what the job demands. An online marketplace called Promptbase has already sprung up, where prompt engineers can sell their carefully crafted instructions for image-generation tools.
Conclusion
As the dust from the shockwave of the advent of this new ChatGPT technology and its hype settles down, the organisation world over have realised that they need to focus on the applicability and training of this model to extract gainful outputs; which in turn has led to aggressive demand for AI engineers, who can do more than just make prompts. Some companies need prompt engineers in customer service and engagement, content creation, teaching, legal profession, drug discovery, autonomous vehicles, quality control, financial analysis, newspaper industry, publishing, etc. This demand cannot be viewed as a bad trend.
Further, the output of a prompt engineer is personality oriented and can also be error intensive. Hence, the quality is a factor of concern, and in the thus concurrently, there will be a need for quality control and supervision over AI bots and what they produce, at least for the foreseeable future.