What is a prompt?
Let's start with a little help: not all libraries are the same. More on this later. First of all, it's about prompts. Not the adjective “prompt”, which can be seen in the picture and has had the career of many German words: The origin is Latin, in the meaning “quickly” it immigrated from the French language.
Since AI and AI have become commonplace, the noun prompt has become the word of the hour. For the new meaning “prompt”, it has made an excursion into English, while the roots of “prompt” are the same as for the lowercase “prompt”.
So today we're talking about capitalized prompts: prompts that help AI to spit out what we want. Anyone who has ever tried to get really useful AI results from chat GTP and the like knows what we're talking about.
Libraries as places for books
There is a nice word for libraries: places where books are collected and can be read and/or borrowed. Not to be confused with bookshops where books are sold. To explain what libraries are in more detail, we could go back a long way and start in ancient times with the famous Library of Alexandria. ...
Wait a minute, that wouldn't be so far-fetched. This library did indeed collect written material, but not in the form of printed books, which did not even exist in the Mediterranean region in the 3rd century BC. Manuscripts were written scrolls, papyrus rolls, and it was precisely these that were collected in libraries.
If you were born in the last millennium, like me, you probably associate libraries with places full of books of all kinds, while even conventional libraries have increasingly become collections of all kinds of media in recent years.
So that clarifies what prompts are and what libraries are. And how do the two fit together?
... to prompt libraries
Asking an AI model a question is not that difficult. It can turn into a nice “conversation”, and there's nothing wrong with that. On the contrary, it's a great way to try out what an AI application can or cannot do.
However, if you want to use AI to support work processes, you need a different approach. Then you have a request that needs to be formulated in such a way that the AI also provides the answer that delivers the expected output and thus brings us closer to solving our task. This requires a little practice on the part of the inputting human - or recourse to a collection of prompts that have already been tested and tried for specific purposes and areas of application.
It is precisely such collections of prompts that become valuable resources. In this sense, they are actually similar to conventional libraries, which are always concentrated collections of knowledge. Just like the prompt libraries that are available online and enable people to make optimum use of artificial intelligence and achieve better results.
