I'm an AI prompt engineer. Here are 3 rules to get the best results using ChatGPT – and what people get wrong.

• Greg Schwartz started as a freelance prompt engineer on Upwork in March 2023.
• He shared how he works with clients to improve their prompts for AI chatbots like ChatGPT.
• Schwartz said it's important to tell the chatbot what its role is and give it plenty of context.

This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with Greg Schwartz about working as a freelancer on Upwork. Business Insider has verified revenue and profit with documentation. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I did my college undergraduate in computer science. I had written little bits of code over the years but spent eight years as a freelance UX designer.

In 2023, I decided to pivot to engineering AI prompts and started a podcast about prompt engineering in March. One of my interviewees said he was having a lot of success getting work on Upwork.

I decided to give it a try. I joined the platform and offered AI prompt engineering for large language models, including ChatGPT, Claude, and Midjourney.

AI prompts need to be very clear. There are three concepts that I find particularly useful.

1. Give the chatbot a role

You need to tell the large language model what type of person they are or their job. If you tell it to "act as a writer," that will generate a different response from asking it to "act as a party planner" or "act as a programmer."

If you ask the chatbot: "act as a party planner and write this Python code," it will produce a worse result for what you want than if you ask it to do the same task as a developer.

2. Give it plenty of context

A client I'm currently working with asked ChatGPT to take a document and turn it into a memo. ChatGPT didn't know what to do with that information. Its output was unclear and random.

You need to tell it how long the memo needs to be and give it certain rules to follow to structure it.

For example, if you wanted the AI to read an article and summarize the places in the US that were mentioned the most, it's not enough to tell it to: "Read this article and tell me the three places in the US that were mentioned most."

Instead, you could prompt it: "Read this article over, take notice of all of the locations that are mentioned, go through all of those locations, and find the ones that are in the United States. From that list of locations in the United States, figure out the ones mentioned the most."

3. Break steps into multiple prompts

Often, tasks are more complicated, and you have to give the chatbot step-by-step instructions in multiple prompts.

With the previous example, you could tell it: "Read this through and give me a list of every single place that's mentioned along with the number of times it's mentioned."

Then, the next prompt could be: "Show me the ones in the United States."

The prompt after that could be: "Organize it by number and then pick the three at the top," or whatever you want it to do.