Prompt Engineer — The Most Overhyped Job of the Decade

And why everyone should nevertheless be familiar with writing AI prompts.

There are companies who offer $ 375 k per year to people who tell an artificial intelligence what to do — so-called prompt engineers.

Should you quit your job to become one of these high-paid AI whisperers? If you’re looking for a quick buck, maybe. If you still want to have a job five years from now, hold your horses.

Image created by the author using Adobe Firefly to interpret the prompt “A white robot bunny sitting in front of a computer and typing a prompt into the interface of an AI. White background.”

What’s a prompt?

A couple of years ago, a prompt was what you’ve seen in old hacker movies: a short text or just a single character being shown in a command-line interface, indicating to the user that the system is ready to accept commands. In the context of artificial intelligence, the word has a different meaning.

When speaking of AI systems which have a text interface to accept input from humans, the word prompt refers to a text written by the user, telling the artificial intelligence what to do. The above image, for example, was created with Adobe’s image generating AI Firefly (in beta phase at the time of writing) using a description of what I wanted to see in the picture.

To get the desired results, a prompt should usually meet these criteria:

1. It should be within the scope of the AI system’s…