The five biggest mistakes people make when prompting an AI
ZDNETGenerative AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot can be powerful. Even though generative AI is a fairly new technology, a powerful limitation on its use dates back to the 1950s or earlier: GIGO. GIGO means “garbage in, garbage out.” If you ask AIs the wrong questions or don’t ask them correctly, you’re pretty much guaranteed to get nonhelpful answers.Also: 7 ways to write better ChatGPT prompts – and get the results you want fasterIn this article, I’m going to show you what I consider the five biggest mistakes, but I’m only one source. So, in addition to my own answers, I took this question to the “people” who should know best about this particular topic, the AIs.I’ve asked ChatGPT, Copilot, Grok, Gemini and Meta AI the same question: “What are the five biggest mistakes people make when prompting an AI?”To make sure my thoughts weren’t influenced by those of the AIs, I started out with a list of what are, in my opinion, people’s five biggest mistakes and had already written my detailed descriptions before prompting the AIs for their opinions. The results (and especially the common themes) are very interesting. Here’s a table that aggregates all our answers. More