NLW

What are the prompting tips that are going to drive impact for you?

As I mentioned, a lot of this is coming direct from the horse's mouth, by which, of course, I mean the Sora 2 prompting guide, which OpenAI dropped earlier this week.

There is a ton of detail in here.

I'm not going to try to get to everything.

I'm going to try to hit the big picture points in a way that's more accessible.

And the first one, I think, is when to know to be open versus descriptive when it comes to your prompts.

What I mean by this is that it's our natural instinct, I think, to try to provide the AI a ton of really specific detail to get exactly what we're seeing in our mind's eye out of it.

And frankly, figuring out how to do that is going to be a lot of what these tips are about.

However, there is also another type of use where you just let the AI be more creative.

Sometimes it's going to be valuable, especially if you're not exactly sure what you're trying to get outside of a few key details, to kind of just let the AI do its thing.

As OpenAI writes, shorter prompts give the model more creative freedom, and you can expect more surprising results.

Now, short prompts can be super short.

For example, I just said a fun 1980s educational video explaining reinforcement learning in two sentences.

Or they can be a little bit more detailed.

The example of a short prompt that OpenAI gives is, in a 90s documentary-style interview, an old Swedish man sits in a study and says, I still remember when I was young.

The reason they say this will work well is that 90s documentary sets the style of the video, old Swedish man sits in a study describes the subject and setting, but in a minor detail, which as they say lets the model take creative liberties, and by giving the dialogue I still remember when I was young, Soro will be able to follow that exactly.

They say that this prompt will reliably produce videos that meet these requirements, but all the stuff that's left out, i.e.

the prompt not describing the time of day, the weather, the outfits, the tone, the look, the age of the character, the camera angles, the cuts, the set design, because the prompt doesn't get into those things, they're left to the AI.

And the point is that sometimes leaving those things up to the AI is going to produce really wonderful and valuable results that are different than if you had constrained every little thing.

Now, let's expand this out a little bit and try to move into a realm that's slightly more detailed.