Simon Willison’s Weblog
For a few weeks now I’ve been promoting spell-casting as a metaphor for prompt design against generative AI systems such as GPT-3 and Stable Diffusion.
When you’re working with these, you’re not a programmer anymore. You’re a wizard, right? I always wanted to be a wizard. We get to be wizards now. And we’re learning these spells. We don’t know why they work. Why does Neuromancer work? Who knows? Nobody knows. But you add it to your spell book and then you combine it with other spells. And if you’re unlucky and combine them in the wrong way, you might get demons coming out at you.
I had an interesting debate on Twitter this morning about whether or not this metaphor is harmful or helpful. There are some very interesting points to discuss!
The key challenge here is to avoid implying that these systems are “magical” in that they are incomprehensible and mysterious. As such, I believe the metaphor is only appropriate when you’re talking to people who are working with these systems from a firm technical perspective.
