How to become a freelance AI prompt engineer
Whatever your personal thoughts or feelings about the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), it’s impossible to deny that it’s impacting many industries at the moment, especially in creative sectors. Find out how to become a freelance AI prompt engineer and take advantage of demand for those skills, which don’t require you to learn programming or code.
Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) have been made available to the public over the last 12 months, allowing anyone to use them to create text, images, and even video. And while we share the concerns of many freelancers around how they’re created, used by clients, and the results they produce, the entrepreneurial nature of working for yourself means understanding when you may need to adapt or change your career.
What does a freelance AI prompt engineer actually do?
New AI services are popping up all the time, with well-known examples including ChatGPT, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Jasper, Dall E and more. All of them will produce responses based on set criteria, which are usually defined by user prompts. And those can range from the relatively simple, for example ‘draw a cat,’ to extremely lengthy and complex prompts. These can include artistic and stylistic techniques, formats, and more.
Prompt engineers are also responsible for structuring the input data used for training AI models and optimising it for quality and efficiency. The software has no consciousness or way to tell whether it’s using the right inputs and outputs to deliver the desired results, so both need to be refined by specialists who understand how to communicate with AI chatbots in the right way.
This can provide an opportunity for freelancers with experience in creative fields, who can use language model architecture to translate and utilise existing techniques (for example focal lengths in photography), turn ambiguous problems into clear requests and multi-step processes. The input process also means an understanding of any data bias or inaccuracies inherent in your industry to avoid inaccurate results or potentially harmful misinformation.
As an extremely new field, the responsibilities of a freelance AI prompt engineer are likely to change and evolve over time, and between projects. It’s possible to use artificial intelligence to create entire software extensions or applications, and it’s being utilised in healthcare, financial and legal industries where specialist knowledge will be incredibly important in ensuring companies don’t breach any laws or regulations, or put anyone in potential harm as a result of using AI.
Is there a long-term future for freelance AI prompt engineers?
There is a lot of hype around the new opportunities available for freelance AI prompt engineers, describing them as ‘Ai whisperers’ and promoting examples of high earning roles.
The current surge in demand is likely to continue in the short-term, as an increasing number of businesses and clients look to utilise AI in some way. And with AI chatbots and services still evolving, the need for trainers isn’t likely to fall any time soon.
In the long-term, the two issues will be whether AI can progress to understand natural human language more effectively in the coming years, or whether prompt engineering simply becomes a normal part of working life for the majority of people.
Both are possibilities which mean the quantity of roles available for freelance AI prompt engineers might drop over the coming years, but this is likely to take several years. Looking at how typical user behaviour has changed for search engines such as Google and Bing, most people aren’t going to have the time and resources to become expert AI wranglers overnight, and there’s still a long way to go before AI services can correctly interpret normal human language without any help.
If you’re aiming to develop a career as a prompt engineer for decades, then your focus should probably be on developing your technical skills to secure internal roles training and developing the services themselves, rather than as an intermediary for end users.
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