Illiterate in a whole new genre? Don’t worry, the nice AI will do it for you.

https://www.bespacific.com/how-non-ai-experts-try-and-fail-to-design-llm-prompts/

Why Johnny Can’t Prompt: How Non-AI Experts Try (and Fail) to Design LLM Prompts

Why Johnny Can’t Prompt: How Non-AI Experts Try (and Fail) to Design LLM Prompts – J.D. Zamfirescu-Pereira, Richmond Y. Wong, Bjoern Hartmann, Qian Yang

Pre-trained large language models (“LLMs”) like GPT-3 can engage in fluent, multi-turn instruction-taking out-of-the-box, making them attractive materials for designing natural language interactions. Using natural language to steer LLM outputs (“prompting”) has emerged as an important design technique potentially accessible to non-AI-experts. Crafting effective prompts can be challenging, however, and prompt-based interactions are brittle. Here, we explore whether non-AI-experts can successfully engage in “end-user prompt engineering” using a design probe—a prototype LLM-based chatbot design tool supporting development and systematic evaluation of prompting strategies. Ultimately, our probe participants explored prompt designs opportunistically, not systematically, and struggled in ways echoing end-user programming systems and interactive machine learning systems. Expectations stemming from human-to-human instructional experiences, and a tendency to overgeneralize, were barriers to effective prompt design. These findings have implications for non-AI-expert-facing LLM-based tool design and for improving LLM-and-prompt literacy among programmers and the public, and present opportunities for further research.”

Tools & Techniques. Something for the forensics team?

https://www.bespacific.com/bellingcats-online-investigation-toolkit/

Bellingcat’s Online Investigation Toolkit

Bellingcat’s Online Investigation Toolkit, a spreadsheet that includes “satellite and mapping services, tools for verifying photos and videos, websites to archive web pages, and much more”. Use the navigational icons on the bottom of the spreadsheet to access all the content. Each entry includes: type, name, description, free or fee, guide, country-specific.