The AI Job That could pay you Up to $375K
With the current growth in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry you should take full advantage of a career in prompt engineering. Tech companies from around the world are looking to hire why they are calling “prompt engineers”. These tech companies require people to create prompts to be fed to these AI systems to give great results.
Since these companies are investing heavily in AI (seriously it’s the next gold rush), a prompt engineer has become one of those career’s littered all over the AI space. These job positions offer a very handsome salary too one job is offering $375k that’s a crazy amount of money.
If you are eager to get a job with AI without having an engineers degree, maybe being a prompt engineer might be the perfect job for you. If you have a creative mind and can easily turn images and tasks into a set of words that can be fed to an AI system, then perhaps this job is just for you.
Let us introduce you to the role of the prompt engineer, who knows you might become one, one day. Better get a move on, before robots take this job role too!
If you want to thrive in this lucrative domain and scale up your career, this article will help you learn how to become a prompt engineer.
What does a prompt engineer do?
There isn’t many people in this guide field as it’s a bit niche at the moment. But the general idea of being a prompt engineer is spending your days writing text-based prompts that will be fed into back end systems of AI tools. This enables these tools to do a wide range of things.
Some examples of the way prompt engineering is used are: write blog posts, write sales emails, write stories, generate images and even in some cases generate videos. These are just a few examples, of what prompts a prompt engineer might be working on. A prompt engineer does not need to write any technical code to write these prompts, they just need to write a prompt in a way that the AI system will understand. So yes you could get a job doing this without a degree in computer science or engineering. The true aim of a great prompt engineer is to perfect the model that the AI system works with.
Prompt engineering wasn’t really a thing until OpenAI’s ChatpGPT went viral. That’s when prompt engineering really started to be talked about. Prompt engineering also extends to generative art tools like stable diffusion and midjourney. If you want to become a prompt engineer you don’t need any technical background. If you are a copywrite that would be a good place to start, you just really need that human touch and be able to explain images or ideas to a robot via a prompt. Does this sound like the job you might be looking for?
Some Examples of Prompt Engineering
If you don’t have a clue what a prompt engineer is and find this article just plain confusing, well let us help you out. Here is a quick example of what a prompt engineer is. For this example we are going to be using ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion as our references.
ChatGPT Prompt Engineering
ChatGPT is the most advanced Chat Bot in existence. Because of this many companies have been eager to perfect it’s responses. This is where a prompt engineer might be hired to provide people with reliable and useful prompts, to improve workflow for certain companies with the AI sector. ChatGPT is a Large Language Model (LLM) it specialises in text, it doesn’t create images. So when we use ChatGPT we are using it to provide us with text responses.
Please note these examples are only brief, they aim to help you have basic understanding of how a prompt engineer perfects their prompts. Here is an example process.
- Prompt 1: “Write a blog post about shoes”
- Prompt 2: “Write a 500 word long blog post about shoes”
- Prompt 3: “Write a 500 word long blog post about shoes, make the article seem witty and enjoyable to read”
- Prompt 4: “Write a 500 word long blog post about shoes, make the article seem witty and enjoyable to read. Add a joke about smelly feet”
- Prompt 5: “You are an expert in the field of shoe care with at least 20 years worth experience, you have sold countless shoes to many famous people and are a renowned expert in the field of shoes. Write a 500 word long blog post about shoes, make the article seem witty and enjoyable to read. Add a joke about smelly feet. Try to come across professional but relaxed in your responses”
This is a 5 step process of trying to improve ChatGPT’s response to the above question. The more information we give ChatGPT the better. If you want to see the full response for this prompt check out this paste bin.
Stable Diffusion Prompt Engineering
When it comes to the world of generative AI one of the most spoken about this is Generative AI art. This is where AI tools create images from a prompt. You can literally create works of art and even realistic characters using this great piece of technology.
When it comes to making prompts for AI art it’s a little different and can be quite complicated at times. What you are wanting to do is create a prompt that describes an image you would like to see. This can be both simple and yet hard to achieve. Here is an example of a prompt engineers workflow when creating a prompt for this type of AI technology:
- Prompt 1: “Create an image of a girl dressed in a Halloween outfit”
- Prompt 2: “Create an image of a girl dressed in a Halloween outfit, short hair, villains smile”
- Prompt 3: “Create an image of a girl dressed in a Halloween outfit, short hair, villains smile, highly detailed, unreal engine”
- Now prompt 4 is intense it provides both a prompt and a negative prompt which is unique to AI generated images here is the breakdown:
Prompt: The personification of the Halloween holiday in the form of a cute girl with short hair and a villain’s smile, (((cute girl)))cute hats, cute cheeks, unreal engine, highly detailed, artgerm digital illustration, woo tooth, studio ghibli, deviantart, sharp focus, artstation, by Alexei Vinogradov bakery, sweets, emerald eyes
Negative Prompt: bad anatomy, extra legs, extra arms, poorly drawn face, poorly drawn hands, poorly drawn feet, fat, disfigured, out of frame, long neck, poo art, bad hands, bad art, deformed, gun, double head, flowers,asian,hyperrealistic,child
When it comes to prompt engineering for generative art a negative prompt can be just as important as a regular one. So ensure you perfect both if you want to apply for those job positions.
If you want to get started using Stable Diffusion why not check our our stable diffusion cheat sheet. If you have not used this amazing AI tool before then why not head over to our guide on how to install stable diffusion for windows. Start making AI art today.
The AI Jobs Industry is Booming
Let’s not beat around the bush here the AI industry is having a bit of a gold rush when it comes to generative AI. So it is literally throwing heaps of cash at anyone who might be competent at the job.
So it’s no big surprise that prompt engineering is now considered one of the hottest tech jobs as companies are currently looking for new ways to help train their AI tools. This is to ensure they get the most of the new LLM’s they are working with. If you have tried these AI tools before I’m sure you may be well aware that it doesn’t always provide appropriate or reliable results, sometimes it can be seen as down rite offensive.
This is all part of a dramatic increase in demand for workers who are competent enough to work with AI tools. “Generative AI” and “GPT” are now keywords commonly found on job search websites like LinkedIn. Some of these jobs posts are being advertised from people from all walks of backgrounds. This is most likely down to the fact that being a prompt engineer requires a good use of language not a programming degree.
Look we don’t want to rain on the parade but it’s far too soon to tell how big prompt engineering will become over the next few years, heck AI itself might take over this role at some point. But these big tech companies are eager to throw money at people to do some of these AI jobs. So it would be worth your while to look into weather or not you might make a good prompt engineer.
Just remember to look out for warning signs. If a company wants you to have 3 years worth of experience working with ChatGPT you know it’s not going to be worth applying for! The strange thing about the job title Prompt Engineer is it doesn’t really require you to be an engineer it’s more of a writing expert more than anything, we feel a copywriter basically covers this role or perhaps let’s rename it to prompt specialist?
How you can become a Prompt Engineer
If you want to become a prompt engineer all you need to do is learn how to create prompts that give good results. No don’t go online and google “prompt engineer” courses it’s a load of nonsense. That kind of information should be given out for free because all you doing is doing a bit of descriptive writing. Remember the free prompt examples at the top of this page? yes exactly don’t waste your hard earned money on this kind of things. We recently heard about a person charging nearly $4000 for a course, it’s crazy.
We really recommend you to get familiar with AI generative tools both image and text models. Once you are familiar with them, play around with them and see if you can come up with some really interesting prompts. Save your best prompts to a text file and see if you can improve on them. If you want to impress people online you can share the results of your prompts i.e. the text replies and even the images, you don’t need to share your prompts for people to know you are good at prompt engineering.
The Other Side of the Prompt Engineer Coin
Sadly on the other side of things, some experts believe the prompt engineering hype will eventually burn out. This will be when AI becomes much more powerful and capable of generating it’s own prompts with no human interaction. A word of caution no one knows the future of the role of the prompt engineer so you should consider this when basing your whole career around it. Maybe branch out and do other things within the AI space too?
These high salaries currently offered will not last, this is due to little knowledge in the field. So there might only be a few hundred people capable of being a prompt engineer but in the next 12 months this might have turned into a few thousand. The more people capable of performing a job the lower the wage rates become. So we might see prompt engineer wages the same as other jobs in the industry so expect to see them under $100k.
We know the way that big tech is throwing money at AI can come across suspicious after all the lay offs this industry has had over the past year. But this is a clear indication as to a shift within big tech. They are wanting to push more towards AI tools and content, so we need to ensure that we prepare for any changes to the job industry.
Get your Own First Hand Experience Working with LLM’s
Here at so artificial we recommend you experiment with large langue models like ChatGPT and Bard to learn your own approach when developing prompts for text based programs. Where as if generative AI is your thing you might want to look up stable diffusion, Midjourney and Dall-e-2 (OpenAI’s generative image tool), as we said before don’t pay for the courses. This will get you familiar with these AI models, nothing better than first hand experience. There is no magic to prompt engineering by the way you just need to learn how to word things correctly when communicating with artificial intelligence. Sometimes a prompt will require you to feed AI a piece information before you ask it more questions.
Conclusion
Prompt engineering might not be around for long and it might not attract big six figure salary levels with very little education requirements for much longer. But if at all you are interested in Artificial Intelligence or at least trying to get your foot in the door this might be an easier approach to take.
We personally feel in the next 12 months prompt engineering might adopt a new title and this form of work will be doing behind scenes and implemented into models directly. So the AI generative tools will do all the hard work for us.
What do you think, would you like a job working as a prompt engineer, or do you think it’s going to be obsolete in the next few months? Let us know in the comments below.
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