Firstly, this project was given by Codecademy in the Prompt Engineering course ; the goal is to learn how to refine my prompt engineering skills by uploading documents and asking AI to analyze said documents.
I've chosen Deepseek because it is neck and neck with my favorite AI Gemini. I love the more "human" outputs
when I prompt for a detailed answer.
In this case, the documents for DeepSeek to analyze are a three-part story about a man who learned through experience
and empathy, how to become a great king, and the journey of his sons to become the next ruler of Aridoria.
To create my prompt, I'll first set the context :
I am a researcher, and I need your help with 3 documents; I will upload them, and you will analyze them.
Next, I will break down the tasks:
you will provide a short summary of the documents, along with a list of important points from the documents (bullet points), and you will hold a question and answer session about the 3 documents. In the question-and-answer session, you will give one question, wait for me to answer, and then respond with whether I am correct or incorrect, with a short explanation on why.
I then refined the prompt as if I were writing an email with detailed instructions to another human :
I am a researcher, and I need your help with 3 documents; I will upload them, and you will analyze them with these steps:
- provide a short summary of the documents
- create a bulleted list of important parts from the documents
- you and I will have a Question and Answer session
We will do these tasks one at a time to ensure clarity in what is needed. Are you ready for the documents?
Here is how DeepSeek answered :
As you can see, DeepSeek responded back my confirming my needs (more eloquently, I must admit) and set expectations to make sure that the documents will work within it's scope of skill.
To avoid DeepSeek outputting a long trail of information, I added this prompt: Great! You must wait until I prompt you to move forward with the tasks.
DeepSeek confirmed once again that it will wait until I ask to move forward with each task.
Once the documents were uploaded, DeepSeek not only gave a summary but several points in the story that contributed to the development it's main character(s) as well
as thematic connections from each story/document.
Prompt : Beautifully done. Please go ahead with bullet points on the important parts of these documents.
This time, the key themes were short descriptive words and phrases and for the important points, Deepseek gave points and concise subpoints on what contributed to the part of the story. A bonus was the "Cross-Document Insights " section, which listed contrasts, symbolisms, and foreshadowing of certain events.
This session started to remind me of a more modern version of "Cliff Notes" back in my college days.
Prompt : Wow! Well done, DeepSeek! Please point out where in each document you received the information for each point you made.**
Here, Deepseek not only gave the pages from where it sourced it's information, but it also repeated quotes from the
pages, which made it easier for me to double-check its accuracy.
The Q & A
I will say, I did ask it for a Q and A session -- it asked and answered it's own questions, but that was my fault.
In the draft prompt, I mentioned that it would ask a question, wait for an answer from me and then confirm whether or not
it was correct, along with an explanation why. I totally forgot to add it in the final prompt. Honestly, it answered better
than I ever would anyway.
Next time, I think I will test the same prompts on different AI like Chat GPT and Gemini --I would love to see the difference in what they "feel" are important points from the story.
How would you have worded the prompt?
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