At the Responsible AI Lab (RAIL), we believe that building impactful AI solutions requires not only technical skill but also the ability to communicate effectively with the technology itself. This philosophy was put into practice during our recent internship cycle, where Musah Ibrahim Ali, RAIL researcher, led a specialised training session on Prompt Engineering for our six interns.
This foundational training equipped the interns with crucial skills in prompt design, AI-assisted creativity, and strategic communication with large language models. The session provided them with a powerful toolkit to enhance their primary research projects, from healthcare diagnostics to agricultural innovation.
The training covered essential pillars of modern AI interaction:
- Foundations of Prompt Design: Learning to craft clear, specific, and context-rich instructions to minimise ambiguity and improve result accuracy.
- AI-Assisted Creativity: Using iterative prompting and role-playing scenarios with AI to brainstorm research angles, refine project ideas, and explore unconventional solutions.
- Effective Communication with AI Systems: Understanding model limitations, employing techniques like chain-of-thought prompting for complex tasks, and critically evaluating AI-generated content.
This skill set proved directly applicable to the interns’ diverse projects, enabling them to utilise AI tools more effectively for literature reviews, code debugging, data analysis, brainstorming, and enhancing the user experience aspects of their applications.