You’ve probably stumbled across this figure, too: Prompt writers and prompt engineers can earn up to $335,000 a year (compare for example this article in the weekly SPIEGEL). Another headline with a similar message reads: A survey of around 1,200 executives from ResumeBuilder.com found that 91% of companies are looking for workers who use ChatGPT, and 29% of companies are looking for Prompt Engineers.
We are currently experiencing a fundamental upheaval in the world of work, and a few things may turn out as a hype that won’t last. In any case, it makes sense to look at what’s trending.
What can be considered safe to say: We will ALL become prompt engineers. The use of various AI tools will soon be just as natural as working with WORD or EXCEL. The Large Language Models (LLM) generate initial ideas, make suggestions for structuring topics, formulate cover letters, and so on. Gradually, we will (have to) empower all employees to work efficiently with these tools. And the interface is becoming ever more easy to use, that’s the revolution we’re currently experiencing. It is becoming less and less necessary to know the “tips and tricks” of prompting, because in the future you will simply communicate with the machine intelligence for upcoming tasks as with an assistant or consultant.
On the other hand, if you ask me, it’s realistic to assume that there will be specialized prompt engineers in creative agencies, for example, who develop images for advertising campaigns – that’ll be done in accordance with Corporate Identity (CI), and in consistently high quality. In all likelihood, however, these are creatives who used to work with a design program and now work with Midjourney.ai or Stable Diffusion. In short, the tool set is changing, and certainly the methodological approach, but what we certainly won’t experience is that a prompt engineer sits next to a creative designer, who then enters the creative’s image ideas into the AI tools.
And because my motto is: “Eat your own dog food”, I am gradually training to become a prompt engineer. Here’s a certificate I received after completing a recommended prompt engineering course on www.prompthero.com in AI Image Generation.
Addendum (as of 19 OCTOBER 2023)
The time has come. In Henry Hasselbach‘s AI newsletter you could just read the swan song for the guild of prompt engineers – headline: “The last days of prompt engineering”.
The last days of prompt engineering Prompt engineering was THE THING just a few months ago: learn prompt engineering and you’ll be speaking the language of the future. But as it often happens in the tech world, hype disappears as quickly as it arrived. And in this case, prompt engineering will soon no longer be the most important AI skill. But why?
With the continuous improvement of AI models, they need fewer “artificially engineered” prompts. DALL-E 3 is a good example of this – here you get first-class images with less than ten words. Of course, it will still be important to know exactly what you want, but you no longer need to master specific wording to get there.
Furthermore, AI workflow tools could make “chatting” superfluous. New AI tools now hide the actual prompts behind the scenes. They simply ask a list of questions or use other methods, such as Adobe’s new Draw & Delight (see above), which generates images based on sketches.
