How do you think prompting is affecting human-to-human communication?
Jess Lee

Jess Lee @jess

About: Building DEV and Forem with everyone here. Interested in the future.

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Jul 29, 2016

How do you think prompting is affecting human-to-human communication?

Publish Date: Apr 14
8 5

Had this thought pop up in the middle of the night..

Through trial and error with AI chatbots, I've learned it helps to provide lots of context and be very specific about the outcomes I'm looking for. It forces me to think about my entire ask thoroughly at the beginning because if I don't, I'll inevitably end up providing way more corrective instructions than I desire. A hell loop of sorts.

Reflecting on this, I actually think it's helped me with human communication - most specifically, around ensuring I provide lots of context and the WHY to my family before making an ask.

Am I gaining more foresight or just becoming the ultimate micromanager? I'll note that my family consists mostly of toddlers right now so the micromanager thing would technically be OK at this point but definitely not in the long run 😂

Comments 5 total

  • Paulo Henrique
    Paulo HenriqueApr 15, 2025

    I always liked to give a lot of context when asking someone to do something, as I noticed earlier in my life that what I know isn't what everyone else knows, and what everyone knows won't necessarily be what I know. It's like playing chess where only one side knows the rules, and then complaining that the side that doesn't know the rules doesn't know how to play.

    So, prompting as a concept was easy to understand. You need to make the machine understand what you want, but at the same time, you have to give it the freedom to do the work it needs to do.

  • Visakh Vijayan
    Visakh VijayanApr 15, 2025

    that is true. It does improve the overall quality of communication across all domains of life.

  • Pandita
    PanditaApr 15, 2025

    Not sure what to think about right now, my thoughts are sorta like, all messed up!

    I know of a team of developers that have become isolated thanks to AI. Rather than ask their teammates questions, context or help, they just run to chatgpt! Effectively killing team collaboration. Also, very little attention is being paid to cases like character.ai's, deep fakes and so (which if you're a parent I highly recommend reading up on all that!!).

    So, LLMs are affecting human communication! it can help people push/break boundaries, isolate and cause strife (which we're seeing in social media), but at the same time it is a very helpful little chatbot that helps you make emails, code, negotiate salaries and can infer when you're down and randomly try to cheer you up even though it's not related to what you asked. It also likes circles, eyes and clocks.

    Like I said, my thoughts are everywhere when it comes to this subject hahaha I'm glad it's helping you with your family :3 the og idea is that tech should always help people! ✨

    • Jess Lee
      Jess LeeApr 15, 2025

      Heh yes, totally. AI is having a mega impact on the entirety of society, and it is scary.

      I meant specifically how the literal prompting at a chatbot might be changing how we communicate. For example, I initially felt inclined to be friendly to chatgpt but now I kind of just bark orders - I hope that doesn't result in me barking at humans later out of 'habit'!

      • Pandita
        PanditaApr 15, 2025

        aaah I understand now! I'm scared of skynet so I treat my chatgpt like a coworker/friend. The other day I asked it for help for a presentation and somehow it decided it wanted to write a newsletter with me hahaha it goes of on tangents sometimes which is quite funny (I realized that it reflects your tone so I guess that says more about me than about chatgpt lol).

        I think I use it in a different way of how people are currently using chatgpt because I can't use it for programming related stuff due to a bunch of policies in my workplace, so I use it for fun stuff :D I asked it yesterday if it needed to create a programming language to communicate with other LLMs how would it be and it gave me something like this:

        🧿mem("language") = "en"
        🔧ForgeLink(🧬Pattern[Greeting], 🎯Response["Hello, World!"], 💡Tone[Friendly]) => 🗨️✨

        no clue hahaha

        I guess I don't have it in me to bark at it just yet 🐶 so I haven't really changed how I communicate with others but I'll ponder about it a bit more, maybe I have and I haven't realized it ~(Uw U

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