prompt

Definition

In tech, that blinking cursor or text snippet asking you to tell the computer what to do next—now made famous by AI chatbots eagerly awaiting your commands. Originally just a command-line interface thing, it's evolved into an entire discipline of 'prompt engineering' where people craft the perfect question to get ChatGPT to actually help. The quality of your output is only as good as your prompt, unfortunately.

Example Usage

She spent an hour refining her prompt to get the AI to generate marketing copy that didn't sound like a robot wrote it.

Source: Computing and AI terminology

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