Asking chatbots follow-up questions. “One of the big pro tips that I give to people is that it’s totally fine to have your experience with one of these bots to be multi-turned,” says Connor Hayes from Meta AI. “Meaning, you’re prompting it, you’re getting a response, and you’re saying, ‘No, I want you to change this thing.’” This reflects the advice I’ve received from multiple people who are working on AI tools. Definitely craft a strong starter prompt, but stay in the moment and react to the generated output with thoughtful questions to improve your results.

Three types of follow-up questions worth asking: 

• Fact check. This is the most basic of follow-ups that I hope you’re using often. Many chatbots can now access websites to double-check info, but make sure the cited websites are of high quality.
• New approach. Is the tone of the output wrong? Do you feel like the chatbot misunderstood your question? Instead of starting over, just ask for what you’d like to be different about the output or share more context about the request.
• Unspool the thread. Is there an odd-but-true detail in the original answer you’d like to explore more? What about a sentence or two in the output that gets at the heart of what you’re looking for? Double-down and ask the AI to expand on that aspect.

For today’s reading, let’s explore Anthropic’s prompt library. Some of the examples provided in the learning hub are more attuned to the needs of developers, but there’s plenty to glean by clicking around and reading different approaches to prompting and creating AI tools. Which one is the most helpful or interesting to you?