HELP ME THINK: A Simple Prompting Strategy for Non-experts to Create Customized Content with Models
This addresses the problem of overwhelming and task-specific prompting techniques for non-expert users, offering a more accessible approach, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing prompting methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of enabling non-expert users to control and customize content generated by language models by proposing a simple prompting strategy called HELP ME THINK, which involves GPT3 asking users questions to guide task execution, demonstrating efficacy on various complex tasks.
Controlling the text generated by language models and customizing the content has been a long-standing challenge. Existing prompting techniques proposed in pursuit of providing control are task-specific and lack generality; this provides overwhelming choices for non-expert users to find a suitable method for their task. The effort associated with those techniques, such as in writing examples, explanations, instructions, etc. further limits their adoption among non-expert users. In this paper, we propose a simple prompting strategy HELP ME THINK where we encourage GPT3 to help non-expert users by asking a set of relevant questions and leveraging user answers to execute the task. We demonstrate the efficacy of our technique HELP ME THINK on a variety of tasks. Specifically, we focus on tasks that are hard for average humans and require significant thinking to perform. We hope our work will encourage the development of unconventional ways to harness the power of large language models.