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Comment by LollipopYakuza | Hacker News Reader

I have recently realised that people actually don't know how to prompt. They use AI "raw" and don't understand how the question can have a drastic impact on the result, let alone using skills or system prompts.

Learning new topics or skills is a very good example, I had the same experience as you with Claude when I learned a new language.

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Which isn’t surprising at all if you turn off your adblocker and look at how these AI chat products are marketed to the general public. They’re presented as all-knowing oracles that can deliver exactly what you want with only the vaguest and briefest of prompts.

Maybe some argue it's ASI but for me AGI requires that the AI understand what you're trying to ask rather than require you to carefully engineer a prompt.

"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?"

If a random person comes up and asks you a malformed question how do you answer? What's worse if what if the question is not actually malformed in some contexts and because you're a wizard that has massive amount of contextual information there are plenty of right answers for the 'wrong' question you just asked.

In schools classrooms tend to avoid unlimited exploration as it would take unlimited time. On your AI prompt the next thing you ask could be anything, anything at all. Just exactly how is the AI supposed to know if you're an idiot?

Continuing the great tradition of claiming that any machine, and especially any AI, unless it takes over literally everything, is worthless. Or in the words of Pablo Picasso:

"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." (he was not joking by the way)

Of course, if computers DO threaten to take over literally everything, then people are even more scared and react aggressively, as demonstrated in this 1939 article describing IBM's vocoders:

"The Pedro Peril" (the first AI that actually talked back was nicknamed Pedro, and described as "the latest and most fearful gadget from IBM", the journalist's conclusion was to suggest Pedro be deported as he would spread propaganda and maybe even become a dictator) (unsigned Washington Post editorial, 1939)

Here's Pedro in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rAyrmm7vv0

If you're starting a fresh session the AI has no context at all beyond your prompt (and the generic system prompt). It isn't psychic, it can't know if you want a straight answer, an elaborate explanation or an interactive teaching lesson. You have to actually say what you want

I'm not a huge fan of prompt engineering or elaborate skills that are longer than a couple sentences. But you have to give the AI context. The more context the better

That isn't really a good defense. An intelligent creature (i.e. a human) will recognize that it lacks context, and ask probing questions to get more information. An LLM just boldly goes down a path with only a fraction of the information, which is yet another proof they aren't actually intelligent.

"Thinking" models do that, now. They either search for the context (token usage goes brrr...) or ask for more information before going further.

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