Artificial Intelligence (AI) Prompt Crafting Basics
What is prompt crafting?
In the context of AI, a prompt is an initial input or instruction given to an AI system, like a chatbot. Prompts can be as simple as "What is climate change?" or as complicated as "Act like a professor in a freshman-level writing course who assigned a research paper that requires personal experience and reflection. I want to write about deforestation and the urban heat island effect in Richmond, Virginia. Provide thought-provoking questions for reflection and research to help me connect personal experiences with academic inquiry."
Prompt crafting can be defined as a process of refining a prompt to obtain more tailored and specific responses. The prompt acts as a trigger or guide for the AI to generate a response or perform a certain task. Let's hear a definition of prompt crafting from VCU Libraries:
The term "prompt engineering" is often used to describe the process of writing instructions that can be interpreted and used by a generative AI model (Schulhoff et al., 2024). However, the word "engineering" can obscure the actual engineering practices used to design the interface and train the models. As an alternative, one might consider the term "prompt crafting," as craft is a creative process that is shared between artmaking and engineering, having both aesthetic and functional considerations (Markowitz, 1994). Given all of the discussion around AI and creativity, a term like "crafting" rather than "engineering" might better capture all the various applications of writing prompts for AI models.
-Oscar Keyes, Multimedia Teaching and Learning Librarian, VCU Libraries
How can prompt crafting be a part of the writing process?
- It is vital to understand when it is appropriate to use AI during your writing process.
- AI is meant to be a tool in your writing process and not a content generator.
- AI can assist you with many things, but you always need to write your own material.
- AI is most appropriate when used for brainstorming, templating/modeling, understanding structure/norms within a given discipline, and formulating questions to fuel your reflective, personal, or research inquiries.
Now that we've defined prompt crafting, let's outline some basic parameters. Below are some basic dos and don'ts inspired by a blog post published by the Writing Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Dos
- Give the AI a role
- Giving AI an identity or role helps to narrow down the type of results you receive.
- Clearly stating your role or perspective and giving the AI parameters will clarify your results.
- If your discipline has certain writing conventions, or if you are writing this paper for a certain type of class, you can ask the AI to "Act as if..."
- Let's return to our original example of a prompt: "Act like a professor in a freshman-level writing course who assigned a research paper that requires personal experience and reflection." This role (professor) gives parameters for the AI to function in and caters to your personal needs.
- Giving AI an identity or role helps to narrow down the type of results you receive.
- Be specific
- The AI needs your input for any specifications, like length, genre, tone, or syntax.
- Giving the AI a role helps center the type of audience you are writing for (such as a paper for a 300-level college course), but any parameters you anticipate needing should be clarified in your instructions.
- This could look like telling the AI t include ore formal diction, take a certain narrative approach, or adopt a certain viewpoint.
- Let's return to our example: "Act like a professor in a freshman-level writing course who assigned a research paper that requires personal experience and reflection. I want to write about deforestation and the urban heat island effect in Richmond, Virginia. Provide thought-provoking questions for reflection and research to help me connect personal experiences with academic inquiry." Notice the amount of detail included in the prompt and how that will help responses align with what you are most interested in.
- The AI needs your input for any specifications, like length, genre, tone, or syntax.
- Rinse and repeat
- You will have to hold the AI's hand through every step of the process.
- This might require you to keep the same conversation thread going as you ask clarifying or refining questions to get the results you want.
- To return to our example, after the initial prompt and response, we might say "What more personal questions should I ask myself about deforestation and urban heat island effect to connect lived experience and research in a narrative?," "Give me more clarifying questions that will help me brainstorm and outline my essay," or going back to step 2 and providing more specifications on the type of writing response you need.
- You will have to hold the AI's hand through every step of the process.
Don'ts
- Don't expect perfection
- Remember, AI is simply a part of your process, but the writing and thinking can only be done by you.
- Like any good writing process, the steps you take to get to the final product can be complex.
- Be patient and expect you might have to revise your questions several times if your collaborator—the AI—doesn't produce a satisfactory response on the first try.
- Remember, AI is simply a part of your process, but the writing and thinking can only be done by you.
- Don't copy and paste
- While you might end up paraphrasing a sentence or two you like from AI, never copy and paste (plagiarism/cheating is never okay), and be sure to cite when necessary.
- Always write your thoughts in your own words.
- To protect your privacy (and that of others), don't paste personal information or original intellectual property into the chat box.
- Visit the Technology Services website for the most up-to-date list of VCU-approved AI technology.
- While you might end up paraphrasing a sentence or two you like from AI, never copy and paste (plagiarism/cheating is never okay), and be sure to cite when necessary.
- Don't trust everything you read on the internet (or in this case, in a chat box)
- AI gets its information from all over the web, and just like humans, can create "hallucinations," (also called "fabrications") or fake results. This occurs when AI makes up sources, fabricates information, and misinterprets sources.
- AI takes information from an internet search and reorganizes it for the user. Therefore, sometimes the AI presents a sequence of information in a way that doesn't equal a correct or logical response.
- AI can make up fake URLs.
- While some AIs like Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity cite the sources of their information, not all of them do, and sometimes these sources are actually AI-generated, so make sure to fact-check.
- AI gets its information from all over the web, and just like humans, can create "hallucinations," (also called "fabrications") or fake results. This occurs when AI makes up sources, fabricates information, and misinterprets sources.
Prompt crafting takeaways
To summarize, turning to AI will work for generating thought-provoking questions related to your research topics, suggesting concepts that you can then go research yourself, and modeling structural writing trends that you can then be inspired from. This is all due to the fact that AI relies on probability models to generate responses, which is why it is always necessary to review and double-check AI-generated information. Only you can write your own work, but prompt crafting can be a useful tool throughout your writing process.
Works Cited
Markowitz, S. J. (1994). The Distinction between Art and Craft. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 28(1), 55–70. https://doi.org/10.2307/3333159
Schulhoff, S., Ilie, M., Balepur, N., Kahadze, K., Liu, A., Si, C., Li, Y., Gupta, A., Han, H., Schulhoff, S., Dulepet, P. S., Vidyadhara, S., Ki, D., Agrawal, S., Pham, C., Kroiz, G., Li, F., Tao, H., Srivastava, A., … Resnik, P. (2025). The Prompt Report: A Systematic Survey of Prompt Engineering Techniques (No. arXiv:2406.06608; Version 6). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2406.06608