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AI: Student Guide to ChatGPT, CoPilot and Other AI Resources

Guide content supports the teaching and research goals of multiple departments on campus. Content represents a non-exhaustive selection of essential resources and tools for engaging a wide range of backgrounds and viewpoints

Creating Prompts

What is prompting?speech-bubble-two

To put it simply, it's what you type into the chat box.

The way you prompt makes a huge difference in the output that Copilot or ChatGPT gives you, so its worth learning some tips.

Always verify the information it gives you.

Think of ChatGPT as your personal intern. They need very specific instructions, and they need you to verify the information.

ChatGPT sometimes makes things up.

That's because it's designed to write in a way that sounds like human writing. It's not designed to know facts.

Tips for writing effective prompts

  1. Give it some context or a role to play.
  2. Give it very detailed instructions, including how you would like the results formatted.
  3. Keep conversing and asking for changes. Ask it to revise the answer in various ways.

Examples

  1. A role could be, "Act as an expert in [fill in the blank]."
    Act as an expert community organizer.
    Act as a high school biology teacher.
    Act as a comedian.
  2. Example prompt:
    Act as an expert academic librarian. I'm writing a research paper for Sociology and I need help coming up with a topic. I'm interested in topics related to climate change. Please give me a list of 10 topic ideas related to climate change.
  3. Example of changes: (keep conversing until you get something useful)
    Now give me some sub-topics or research questions for [one of those topics]. And give me a list of keywords and phrases I can use to search for that topic in library databases and Google Scholar.
     

    Or...

    I didn't like any of those topics. Please give me ten more.

More Tips for ChatGPT or Copilot

  1. Sometimes it gets confused if you change topics in the middle of a conversation. When you want to change the subject, start a new chat.
  2. It will remember what you've said in the course of a conversation, so you don't have to repeat everything again. Just continue like it's part of the same conversation.
  3. Don't ask ChatGPT for a list of sources. It will often make them up. Instead use library search, library databases, or Google Scholar. It can search the web now (as of mid 2025), but even with that feature activated, some of the sources may not exist.
    See I can't find the citations that ChatGPT gave me. What should I do?
  4. Choose an output format. In addition to paragraphs it can give you a table, a bulleted list, ascii art, multiple choice quiz questions, emojis, computer code, and more.
  5. In ChatGPT you can see a history of your conversations. You can go back to a previous conversation and continue it. If you like, in the settings you can delete your history and turn off the saving of future history. You can also export your history and save it on your own computer.
  6. Remember, don't enter any personal, private data in ChatGPT, because OpenAI may use your input to help improve the model. The free version is a research experiment. If you don't want your data used to help improve ChatGPT, you can turn it off in the settings. Go to your name, then Settings, then Data Controls and turn off, "Improve the model for everyone."