Do you ever find yourself disappointed with the responses from AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude? Whether youre an avid enthusiast or AI-curious, youve likely experienced an underwhelming output from one of these platforms.
Yes, AI is getting better every day, but there are some limitations that may be hampering your efforts. Lets breakdown what they are and how to overcome them.
Common Issues With AI
Context Window Saturation
Youll notice that the AI starts forgetting earlier details or answers inconsistently. Every model has a fixed token limit. Once that limit is breached, older tokens drop off (truncated), so the model literally no longer sees the earlier part of the conversation.
When an AI reads or writes text, it doesnt see whole words or characters. Instead, it chops everything into small, consistent-sized pieces called tokens and processes those. Think of tokens as Lego bricks the model snaps together (or pulls apart) to build language.
Hallucination
When you see factual errors, numbers that dont add up, or wild guesses in the responses you receive, its clear the AI is hallucinating or fabricating answers. Its not not doing this on purpose, its just trying to be helpful when it doesnt have enough context from the prompt.
Remember that AI is still a computer and its using probabilities learned from its training to predict the next word or number to fill in the blank. Anyone who has been in a casino knows that probabilities dont always work in our favor.
Prompt Decay
Sometimes the AI will forget an instruction that you provided it earlier in the chat and youll find yourself reminding it of a specific requirement or parameter. As your chat session with the AI lengthens, some relevant instructions may get buried or diluted.
How To Overcome These Issues
When you encounter these common challenges with AI tools, its important that you re work your prompts with these tips:
- Chunking To avoid having the AI over saturating its context window, break your tasks into smaller, more carefully worded prompts. At each stage you can summarize intermediate results before moving on.
- Anchoring Repeat or reference critical constraints in each new prompt (Reminder: maintain a neutral tone and cite sources).
- Structuring Giving the AI a clear format like Give me three bullet points, each under 20 words it can refocus its output.
Conclusion
Improving your prompt-writing skills is an ongoing process, but the results are worth it. By understanding AI's limitations and applying these techniques, you'll see a significant improvement in the quality and accuracy of responses. Remember, the best AI outputs almost always come from the best inputsyour prompts.