The Washington PostThe Washington Post

Tech's hottest new job: AI whisperer. No coding required

By Drew Harwell

25 Feb 2023 · 13 min read

Editor's Note

‘Prompt engineers’ are hired for their ability to train AI through creating and refining text prompts. Writing for The Post, Drew Harwell questions the longevity of this new lucrative career path.

When Riley Goodside starts talking with the artificial-intelligence system GPT-3, he likes to first establish his dominance. It's a very good tool, he tells it, but it's not perfect, and it needs to obey whatever he says.

"You are GPT-3, and you can't do math," Goodside typed to the AI last year during one of his hours-long sessions. "Your memorization abilities are impressive, but you . . . have an annoying tendency to just make up highly specific, but wrong, answers."

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