Prompt Engineering

Sarah-Jane Field

Researchers are adopting new AI techniques, such as generative AI, without a full understanding of the ethical implications. This is due to a lack of evidence on potential risks and limited AI ethics training.

Science in the age of AI
The Royal Society, 2024

…I, and the progress brought about by coding and decoding, am also the end of women having a monopoly on childbirth. You should be pleased, but you’re angry with me.

dialogues for one
Field, 2023

A Large Language Model’s Definition of Prompt Engineering

Prompt engineering involves crafting precise and effective prompts to guide AI models in generating desired outputs. This practice requires a nuanced understanding of language and its intricacies, as the quality of AI-generated content heavily depends on the input provided. Despite its seemingly straightforward nature, prompt engineering embodies the sophisticated interplay between human creativity and machine ‘intelligence’.

Is it too simple, too much of a ‘pop-psychology’ diagnosis, to suggest that a good part of the vitriol and suspicion around dynamic technologies, and related horrors about whether, or when, they will become conscious, is linked to the desires and phantasies Man has about himself bearing a new type of species? One that doesn’t leak and smell as humans are known to. It is unfair to suggest that women are the only ones threatened in the present milieu, as the Cartesian Human himself, in said phantasy sees himself annihilated too. Even so, if those desires and phantasies seem to carry more than a hint of misogyny, perhaps it’s because all over the world women’s rights are currently being undermined. Couple this with well-publicised biases regarding women in generated images, and concerns about contemporary technology writ large supplanting women, as child-bearers, as romantic partners, and as citizens altogether seem unsurprising.

There are undoubtedly many women who would welcome a world in which they were no longer subject to the iniquities and violence that childbirth has meant for females and infants throughout history, including the present day. There are, however, compelling arguments to suggest that it was never pregnancy and birth alone to blame for inflicting so much distress, and for manifesting the barriers women have had to overcome. Instead, technology – especially medical technology – has exacerbated the violence. Witnessed today, when it becomes entangled with law, religion and health policies that insist women and even children go through with pregnancies when an abortion would be a better option.

One should always remain careful about the risks of romanticising birth along with the traps of essentialism. Bracha Ettinger’s matrixial thesis will be helpful here. Ettinger reminds us that we, all of us, regardless of sex or gender, were once carried inside a womb. Every one of us has buried deep within our material memory some knowledge of what it is to exist inside the body of another, and for our flesh to have emerged from maternal flesh. As long as external wombs remain on the fringes of medical science, this passage continues to be universally relevant.

Exploring the linguistic roots of the phrase ‘prompt-engineer’ since it potentially reveals something about our present situation, does not merely pertain to mothers but to everyone born.

The Online Etymology Dictionary states:

‘Prompt’, relates to Latin “promptus” – “brought forth,” hence “visible, apparent, evident, at hand,” past-participle adjective from promere “to take or bring out or forth”

The etymology of engineer relates to the Latin “‘gignere’ (the present active infinitive of gignō (“to bear, beget, give birth to; to cause, produce, yield”)”.

 ‘Promptengineer’, therefore, could be interpreted linguistically, as a descendant of ‘making pregnancy and birth visible’. In other words, ‘abstracting’ pregnancy and birth into a formula accessible to all.

The following description by Luciana Parisi (2004; 1) in Abstract Sex resonates with such a reading:

Artificial sex calls for the ultimate separation of the mind from biological limits, the simulated experience of being free from physical constraints in the immersive matrix of information celebrated by the cowboys of cyberspace. This triumph of artificial sex is said to crown the achievements of the male model of sex defined by the drive towards discharge, the channelling of all flows towards a final climax, the pleasure of self-satisfaction. Finally detached from the biological body by transcending all fleshy ties, this dominant model of sex realizes the most classical of patriarchal dreams: independence from matter. Leaving behind the heavy meat of physical presence and floating free in cyberspace, the triumph of artificial sex is equated to the triumph of the economy of pleasure (the discharging model of patriarchy).

And so, we may wonder, is prompt engineering a form of abstract sex? And if so, how can we trust the prompt engineers, who may be giving birth to baby prompt engineers, to populate the world to come?

At a time when external wombs, technological integration and the spectre of man-made consciousness are either with us or seem on the verge of possibility, what costs and benefits should we be contemplating in a future world where women no longer have a monopoly on the most primal of events, giving birth? Will prompt engineering eventually lead to live births, before which prompt engineers will have sat down at computers with expectant parents to choose eye colour, IQ, and disease-free genes?

These [attached] images were made in 2022 shortly after the early release of generative image platforms, and are included in dialogues for one (2023); a conversation between an I and a non-I, set inside a womb, and then on a heath.  One ends the dialogue by saying to the Other: “I don’t know what you expected from me. I’m not even a real interpolating store of information but an imaginary, executed through the symbolic, trying to make sense …” But then the character gets stuck and reverts to spewing out scraped information like a machine about the etymology of interpolation. The Other is confused and cries, “What are you doing? Are you breaking down? Are you going mad? Are you leaving? Am I being miscarried?”

References and Bibliography

Field, SJ (2023) dialogues for one. Available at: https://www.sarahjanefield.com/dialogues-for-one (Accessed: 2 June 2024).

Parisi, L. (2004) Abstract sex: philosophy, bio-technology and the mutations of desire. London; New York: Continuum (Transversals).

Royal Society (2024) Science in the age of AI | Royal Society. Available at: https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/science-in-the-age-of-ai/ (Accessed: 3 June 2024).

Image Details

>>Lamellae (prompt-engineered), 2022: Images generated by a text-to-image algorithm using ‘Lamella, pink, red, Hieronymus Bosch, 4D render, Bracha Ettinger’s Matrixial Borderspace, objet a, ––aspect 9:16’; words from research which explores being human in a landscape populated with artificial intelligence, stories, and fleshy hybrids <<