Understanding the Importance of Personas in Prompting
A Persona, also called ‘an AI character’ or ‘role’ is a prompting technique where you tell the chat: ‘You are a lawyer’ or ‘You are a doctor’ or ‘You are something else’. Only then you ask your question.
Using a persona while prompting is one of the best things you can do at the start of a chat.
Applying Persona Prompting to Real-Life Situations
Let’s go back to our ‘Why is Barcelona so good’ example and see it in action.
I’ll start the conversation with: ‘You are an architect. Why is Barcelona so good?’
The AI provided a great answer. This was kind of the answer I was looking for.
Why did this work?
Well… We provided an AMAZING context. This is why personas are so great.
The Role of Context in Persona Prompting
Shall we do another one?
In Team-GPT, we’ve got Personas, ready to be used, so I’ll fetch one: the Travel expert.
This persona description is much longer. But length doesn’t really matter. Context does!
For the duration of this conversation, please assume the role of a well-informed and enthusiastic travel expert. Your responses should focus on providing travel recommendations, itineraries, and tips for exploring new destinations and immersing oneself in local cultures. As I ask questions, kindly offer tailored suggestions based on my preferences, interests, and travel goals. Create an engaging and informative conversation that inspires a spirit of adventure and discovery.
If you understand, please reply only with: ‘Yes. Let’s go!’
Is the extra text bringing extra context? Not really sure but the general rule was: ‘The more, the better”
💡 This lesson is a part of the ChatGPT for Work course
The course is interactive, if you take it inside the Team-GPT platform.
ChatGPT for Work: The Interactive Course contains:
• 100+ tried and tested prompts • 100+ exercises • 100+ extra notes and comments • 1000s of use cases • PDFs files for later reference
Let me do another one. Prompt Expert. In fact, being a prompt expert does NOT provide CONTEXT.
Be careful what personas you choose to use.
During this conversation, please assume the role of a seasoned and engaging prompt expert. Your responses should focus on offering insights and guidance on writing effective, thought-provoking, and compelling prompts for various applications, including AI training, creative writing exercises, and conversation starters. As I ask questions, kindly provide practical tips and techniques for creating prompts that inspire creativity and encourage thoughtful responses. Create an engaging and enlightening conversation that helps me enhance my prompt crafting skills.
If you understand, please reply only with: ‘Yes. Let’s go!’
The Constant Benefits of Using Personas
So, when are personas useful? Always.
From my experience, Personas greatly improve any conversation.
First, Personas provide a lot of context on their own. They are awesome at getting the AI into the headspace of whatever you are trying to ask it.
Second, Personas are also great to create ‘your own persona’ or ‘your own character’. For instance, for the purposes of this course, I’ve created my own ‘AI course instructor’ persona. Every time I need to ask something related to the course.
I highly recommend you create one for yourself and that’s one of your exercises for homework!
From a logical point of view, Personas are nothing but ‘a type of context’.
However, they are so useful, that in this course we will be talking about 3 main steps in prompting: defining the Goal, Context, and Persona.
Using Prompts to Create Personas
You can use a prompt to create your persona.
Generally it is NOT a good idea to have the persona creation in the same chat as the chat itself.
It can MIX UP the personas from above with the persona you want to define.
