What you need to know
- A user-experience engineer at Google DeepMind shared her biggest tips for creating the perfect AI prompt.
- Anna Bortsova uses "meta prompting" to task Gemini with creating detailed AI prompts that will eventually be used to help it complete the main goal.
- By using meta prompting, you can generate prompts that are pages in length to get an ideal output.
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AI products are often only as good as the prompts a user provides, and crafting the perfect prompt isn't an exact science. It's rare that we hear about what makes a successful AI prompt from an expert on the subject, but Google DeepMind UX Engineer Anna Bortsova is pulling back the curtain in a blog post. Bortsova, whose background is in visual arts and engineering, use a little-known technique called meta prompting to create videos with Google's Veo 3 video-generation model.
Bortsova doesn't create her own prompts at all — she uses meta prompting to refine prompts with Gemini that are inputted to Flow or the Gemini app, which use Veo 3. Instead of writing a detailed video-generation prompt, Bortsova writes a prompt for Gemini.
Then, Gemini creates detailed video-generation prompts in bulk. By using Gemini, the video-generation prompts used with Veo can be much longer than one a human would create. They can be "multiple pages" and are occasionally generated five to ten at a time, according to Bortsova.
Here's an example of how the DeepMind engineer creates gen-AI prompts with meta prompting in Gemini:
Bortsova says there are "no rules" when it comes to meta prompting, but there are keys to success.
You want to define a very specific task: ‘write a detailed prompt that an LLM will understand.’ And you want to be clear about your format and style: say, an 8-second stop-motion animation of paper-engineered scenes. Then give it constraints, like foil paper or shiny paper, rather than just general paper. Then let it do its thing.
Anna Bortsova, Google DeepMind UX Engineer
After the initial prompt, users may want to steer Gemini in the right direction with follow-ups. The best exchanges with Gemini are collaborative, and are back-and-forth in nature. Bortsova also recommends getting emotional in your prompts by suggesting "the feeling you want to evoke."
Meta prompting is a technique that can be used in a variety of applications beyond video generation. Any time you want to achieve something with AI, it's a good idea to simply ask an AI model how to achieve it. Instead of painstakingly brainstorming the perfect prompt, use meta prompting. Ask Gemini for help creating the prompt that will eventually be re-inputted into the chatbot to complete the task at hand.
The one tip Bortsova thinks everyone should know? "Pick a subject you love and just start experimenting."
