2. Inputs and outputs #

Like many others, my interest in text-based AI was sparked when I started using Siri on my iPhone.

Siri, a chatbot developed before the advent of modern generative AI, has interactions that are predefined rather than limitless. Its capabilities, such as providing weather updates, were anticipated and manually programmed by Apple engineers. This involves querying an API for weather conditions to answer such queries.

But if you ask Siri to write a poem about a recent event, it won’t be able to assist, as its responses to such specific requests aren't predefined. It’ll probably direct you to a Google search instead. In contrast, modern AI assistants can autonomously create a poem, albeit of varying quality, by filling in the details themselves.

These questions and commands—they’re called prompts. When prompted, a large language model generates text, while a diffusion model creates images. In this chapter, we’re going to examine the types of prompts these models can handle, the underlying mechanics that drive their responses, the structure of prompts, and the ways in which they can be creatively applied in product design.