A language model is an artificial intelligence model trained to predict the next word or a missing word in a sentence, based on your input or prompt. The more specific and clear your prompt is, the better the model understands what you mean. A good prompt contains different elements depending on your goal. When you don’t use specific elements in your prompt, you often receive a generic, superficial, or even irrelevant answer.
What does this look like in practice? If you ask, “What is climate change?”, you’ll get a standard definition. However, if you ask, “Explain in no more than 150 words what climate change is. Explain it as if you’re talking to a high school student. Include an example from the Netherlands.”, you force the language model to give a focused, understandable, and contextual explanation. These kinds of prompts not only help you get better output, but also help you formulate more clearly what you actually want to know.
In section 5.2, you’ll learn which elements can be useful to make your prompt as complete as possible.