Prompt Engineering for AI

This book equips readers with critical communication skills for productive, strategic prompting of large language, image, and multimodal AI models and tools. Working with AI tools requires users to define problems, set objectives, ask better questions, and evaluate the outputs they produced based on user requests. These communication skills discussed in this book, and others, offer a strategic framework for using generative AI tools and adapting as they evolve. The first three chapters explain the basics of AI tools, the utility of communication skills, and the importance of ethics. The next three chapters offer pragmatic advice for prompt engineering, with best practices and frameworks that complement the communication skills framework and prepare readers for text and multimodal outputs. The penultimate chapter emphasizes the importance of evaluating generative AI outputs and custom tools users may create. The book ends by showing how communication skills can be adapted as tools evolve and covers prompt-adjacent topics to help build AI literacy. Arguing that prompt engineering is not a technical skill but rather a communication skill, this comprehensive guide will be valuable for students, instructors, and professionals in the fields of communication studies, marketing, journalism, management, leadership, and any context in which generative AI is used.