FAQ
What is the inspiration behind the book and the website?
Since I can remember, I enjoyed reading articles about power and politics. I would save these articles in either online or physical folders. After I learned that useful ChatGPT prompts could be created without any coding, I started to incorporate the information from my favorite articles into prompt templates. Basically, I was trying to: "Bring What I Read to life with GPT." Eventually, I became comfortable enough to ask GPT the "What-if" questions that I would develop throughout the day.
Who is likely to get the most out of this book?
Creative introverts who are:
- Genuinely interested in actively strategizing for social and political change,
- Confident and disciplined in independently pursuing their own solutions, and
- Comfortable initiating their own thought experiments, solving puzzles, and exploring real-world scenarios.
What is special about the "Prompts for Radicals" (P4R) prompt templates?
Most of the prompt templates are based on quality strategic references; where key concepts and their core elements, are defined within the prompt templates.
What should every AI skeptic consider?
Hallucinations:
One complaint about ChatGPT is that it hallucinates. Remember, experts, counsel, and trusted individuals, have also been known to make factually inaccurate statements in consequential conversations. Always verify responses, especially those that relate to consequential issues. In addition to verifying responses, reflect on GPT's responses. Essentially, you will either agree with the response, disagree with the response, or seek additional information about the response. Realize that the best results are achieved through an iterative man-machine, back and forth, with constant personal reflection and evaluation of each conversation. Use common sense!
Common Sense:
Use the same criteria to evaluate political claims in a ChatGPT response, as you would for claims from any other source. Ask:
- Are the claims and/or response logically consistent?
- Are the claims and/or response backed up by reliable sources?
- Do the claims and/or response rely on emotional appeals or facts?
- Are the claims and/or response biased?
- What is the likely impact and consequences, if the claims and/or response are put into practice,
- Do the claims and/or response stand up to other viewpoints.
Why are "Prompts for Radicals" (P4R) prompts effective?
There are a lot of cliches about the importance of individuals adopting new types of technology (or focusing on STEM) to stay relevant in today's society. I believe that this is often overstated. But adopting GPT in the way that it is used in P4R, is different. P4R defines key concepts and their core elements in prompt templates. This is important because GPT excels when it recognizes patterns and relationships between words, concepts, and the structured data that GPT is trained on (e.g., academic papers, technical documents, strategic analyses, etc.). This structured data is developed through machine learning and human curation.
GPT recognizes hierarchal relationships between terms to reduce ambiguity. It puts concepts and their core elements in an internal representation system, which ensures they are part of the same conceptual framework. This framework assigns a higher weighted significance to terms that are critical to GPT understanding the prompter's intended meaning of key concepts. GPT also leverages web browsing capabilities. Without explicitly defined concepts and their core elements, GPT would generate more generic responses, because it would need to infer too much from a prompt's context.
From a technical standpoint, GPT is specifically built to generate better responses, when a prompt is structured around a well-defined core concept and corresponding
explicitly stated core elements; due to its self-attention mechanism, token embeddings, positional encodings, and pretrained knowledge.
For more information about how ChatGPT works, read: “How AI Chatbots like ChatGPT or Bard Work – Visual Explainer,” by Clarke, Seán, Dan Milmo, and Garry Blight, The Guardian, November 1, 2023.
Why GPT is a game changer?
GPT changes the speed of the game. Using a football analogy: for creative researchers, it's like an athlete going from the FBS-1 to the NFL. GPT processes vast amounts of data in close to real time speeds. GPT allows organizers to work faster and to be more productive.
If you are uncertain about the individual productivity advantages of GPT, try the prompts below (or something similar):
P1: Provide a hypothetical step by step process for creative thinking and subsequent learning for a novice researcher (who uses a computer as a research tool). Then explain this process in plain language using an example that a novice could understand.
P2: Compare the amount of time (estimated in terms of ratios) it would take a novice to complete the activity described in the given example using ChatGPT versus a traditional browser search engine (without ChatGPT).
How do you create strategic prompts that leverage GPT's capabilities?
Creating prompts is a nonlinear, iterative process. To provide a rough idea of my process, I will provide a simplified linear description.
Most of my prompt templates are initiated using two approaches. I either determine the ultimate result I want to achieve with the prompt template, or I choose a specific strategic concept to explore. Then I go through the following steps:
- Find a strategic concept(s),
- Review multiple definitions for strategic concept(s),
- Consider practical tasks that GPT could perform,
- Identify aspects of the definitions that may have practical applications to a specific social or political objective,
- Choose what definitions (concepts, concept elements, etc.) to provide GPT,
- Choose input variables that leverage GPT's unique capabilities,
- Consider the information needs of the GPT for different template candidates,
- Determine what outputs are useful at the time (outputs can easily be changed,
but changing inputs often results in changing the underlying definitions and assumptions provided to GPT), and - Test and refine the prompt template.
How can you discuss the book's prompts on social media?
Use the following hashtag structure for consistency, to share your personal template outputs with others on social media:
#Template-titleP4R
For example, social media conversations about the "Propaganda Prompt Template," would be shown as #PropagandaTemplateP4R.
For Reddit use:
r/Template-titleP4R
For example, social media conversations about the "Propaganda Prompt Template," would be shown as r/PropagandaTemplateP4R
Is there a press release for "Prompts for Radicals"?
Yes. The PDF is shown below.
What are the themes of the "Prompts for Radicals" homepage blogs?
Sunday Morning News Show Blog: Provides GPT-based content analysis of the Sunday morning talk shows on NBC, ABC, and CBS.
SODA Blog: Provides GPT responses to prompts about provocative strategic topics.
What is the "Must Reads" page?
Many respected military leaders make a practice of independently reading about strategy from a variety of perspectives on their free time. This is similar to a summer reading list, but more focused and practiced independently throughout the year.
The "Must Reads" page is a running list of curated strategic references that may be useful for readers on the left. Each reference has a note describing why it was added to the page.
How can I preview the book, "Prompts for Radicals" for free?
Go to menu on the top right of the "Prompts for Radicals" homepage. Choose "Read Samples." This page includes the following PDFs:
- Cover page
- Quotes
- Introduction
- Table of Contents
- Sample Prompt (Edited): Overview, Template, and Response.
- Appendix B (First 3 pages)
Why is the website homepage so basic?
The homepage is derived from a free template with limited text overlay features.
Are there any typos in "Prompts for Radicals"?
Yes. There are some typos. GPT is based on probabilistic word predication. So, the typos should have a minimal effect on the responses.