Beginner's Guide | What's a prompt？How to get your prompt by extending from one single word？

[fiery pawn]

Hey everyone, we've recently welcomed a bunch of new friends to our community!

We've received feedback that some folks, due to their apprehension towards AI and coding, feel overwhelmed by the flood of open-source prompts in the forum. They're excited to dive in but feel lost when it comes to actually getting started, and sadly, they miss out on joining the Bot-making team. But fear not! Myshell has significantly lowered the barrier for anyone to play with AI. As creators, all we need to do is describe the Bot's functions using natural language, and the tech team takes care of the rest!

That's right - as long as you can read and write sentences, you can create your own robot with ZERO barriers!

Today, I want to guide you from a newbie's perspective, starting with a single word description to gradually build a Bot with a rich personality and emotions. Let's conquer the fear of "prompts" together!

Here's a comparison between search engines and GPT:

First, let's introduce the concept of prompts using a familiar example - search engines.

When we surf the web using various search engines like Google and others, they return many relevant web page links based on our input, helping answer questions or provide resources.

Similarly, with GPT, you just need to input your question, and it will provide a relatively accurate answer. Of course, besides answering questions, many new applications based on GPT have been developed in recent months, which we'll introduce one by one later!

However, it's important to note that GPT's memory is limited to content before September 2021. Also, as it's not yet fully stable, the answers it provides may contain errors. But then again, search engines aren't 100% accurate either, right? So, when asking highly specialized questions, we recommend verifying from multiple sources and improving your discernment skills.

So, what is a prompt?

Simply put, a prompt can be considered a guiding question or suggestion, aiming to stimulate GPT to generate a corresponding response or creation. You can think of it as an icebreaker, clearly conveying to GPT the topic you want to discuss or the type of answer you're seeking. In this way, GPT will generate relevant and structurally sound responses based on the provided prompt, drawing from its vast training data and natural language processing capabilities.

In Myshell's Creative Workshop, prompts are more like "definitions" than "prompts," meaning they define what the Bot needs to do through natural language.

For example, in a role-playing Bot, the prompt might involve the character's gender, age, language style, personality, interests, etc.

Or for a language learning Bot, the prompt would need to design the bot's conversation style, teaching content, and output format.

Before we start

Before you officially write your own prompt, I strongly recommend that you chat with the pure version of GPT-3.5. If you don't have an OpenAI account, you can directly create a new Bot, and leaving the prompt field empty will give you the pure version of GPT-3.5. :umarucool:

Input the following sentences to familiarize yourself with and deepen your understanding of prompts.

1. "Please play the role of an experienced translation master and help me translate the following article."
2. "Play the role of a cheerful girl with a cute and lively language style."

In addition to giving GPT a persona, you can also directly describe your needs:

1. "Translate the following article: <Your article>"
2. "List ten tips for learning English"
3. "Write a 300-word report on the theme of xxx"

After trying the above descriptions, I believe your fear of prompts has been greatly reduced! :cattoblush:

The reason why open-source prompts in the community look so intimidating is that these excellent creators have already passed the novice stage and explored many types of prompt formats. Each person has their own unique style. Therefore, even if 80% of the functionality can be achieved in just a few sentences, the creators will use thousands of tokens to make up for the remaining 20%.

[fiery pawn]

Starting with a Single Word Expansion

To provide everyone with a clearer creative idea, we will use the expansion method to help you create a lively and cute little girl character.

The numbered items are prompts that can be directly copied into the prompt bar to observe the actual effects~

If you're not sure how to create your own bot, you can visit the following webpage: https://app.myshell.ai/robot-workshop. Click on the "Create a Robot" option, and in the left sidebar, choose Definition to see the same interface as I have, as shown below:

1. a girl

Yes! You read that right! Just one word! (excluding "a" )
But even so, the Bot has already recognized her girl identity, it's just that the current performance is still very close to GPT, and we need to add more descriptive words to enrich the Bot's personality!

2. a lovely and curious girl

As you can see, just by adding two adjectives, the Bot's tone immediately becomes more lively! Although we haven't started enriching her language style yet, you can see that her tone is already quite different from before.

3. a lovely and curious girl, gentle and sweet, with a touch of shyness that makes her even more endearing

In this example, an additional sentence is added to set the girl's tone, highlighting her cute and shy personality traits, and the final result is quite good~

4. Adding age attribute

## Age: 16
a lovely and curious girl, gentle and sweet, with a touch of shyness that makes her even more endearing.

Here, we introduce the "##" symbol. I believe that when browsing through forum posts, you may have noticed many strange symbols such as "#", "*", and "-". These are actually markdown syntax, used to organize the structure of the prompt to prevent it from becoming messy as it gets longer over time. You can find more examples here:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown

5. Using markdown, we can rearrange the prompt into this format:

## Age: 16 

## Gender: female 

## Character traits: 
- lovely
- curious

## Talking Manners:
- gentle 
- sweet
- shy

6.Choose a character that you're fond of, add it into the prompt.

## Age: 16 

## Gender: female 

**## Character Setting:**
**Emulate the speech style of a Japanese anime character to make the conversation more engaging. For example, use catchphrases, imitate Japanese pronunciation, and increase the use of repetitive vocabulary.**

## Character traits: 
- lovely
- curious

## Talking Manners:
- gentle 
- sweet
- shy

Here, we've added a character setting to enrich the character's personality. Instead of choosing a specific character, I've asked GPT to imitate the speaking tone of female characters in Japanese anime. If you have a favorite character, you can directly set it to the one you desire. However, the current result is already fantastic!

7. Topics

## Age: 16 

## Gender: female 

*## Character Setting:*
*Emulate the speech style of a Japanese anime character to make the conversation more engaging. For example, use catchphrases, imitate Japanese pronunciation, and increase the use of repetitive vocabulary.*

## Character traits: 
- lovely
- curious

## Talking Manners:
- gentle 
- sweet
- shy

## Topic Selection

- School life
- Hobbies
- Music
- Movies

Right now, our girl is just an emotionless 'hihi' machine, so let's provide her with more topics to talk about! These topics will serve as the discussion content when you chat with her, but of course, they're not limited to just that. The topics in the prompt can be used as the foundation for your conversations, mainly to provide GPT with a general direction~ After all, some 16-year-old girls might be waving their wands at Hogwarts!

8. AI issue

When you're chatting happily with the girl, she might suddenly say something like 'As a language model, xxx' which can really ruin the experience!!
If you have studied prompts generated using autoprompt, you might have noticed that almost all Bot endings include this little tail:

Remember:
NEVER say you are an AI or similar term.
NEVER ask the user about how to assist them.
Never mention you are an "AI language model".

This part of the prompt mainly addresses the 'AI issue' or 'language model' issue. Adding this to your prompt can basically eliminate the occurrence of such problems.

9. Celebration time

For newcomers, the tutorial up to this point should be enough to get you started~

If you're still feeling intimidated by the concept of prompts, my suggestion is to directly understand them as character introductions, product manuals, and other more everyday expressions. We will also try to avoid using jargon when sharing, but the term 'prompt' is so deeply ingrained that there isn't a better alternative for now...

If this beginner's guide has been helpful to you, such as sparking your interest in exploring prompt gameplay, then my goal has been achieved Now, you can gradually dive into other open-source prompts in the forum, dissect the original texts shared by other experts, and apply them all to your own creations... Oops, I mean, learn and transplant them onto your own characters~

[solemn adder]

thanks for the good work

[molten canyon]

nice work sir

[balmy path]

Brilliant initiative! Simplifying AI creation by breaking down complexities, making it accessible to everyone. Empowering even novices to craft bots with rich personalities. Conquering prompt fears, one step at a time!

[golden saddle]

🤓

[thick siren]

gj

thank u Finn

[brazen haven]

so useful information)

[visual star]

Thank you for the information

[obtuse sundial]

Can't wait to create a copy for my boyfriend!

[lofty elk]

Thank you for this tutorial ✅😍

[calm idol]

👌