AI Problem-Solving Tactics: Expert Insights from Vanderbilt’s Dr. Jules White

In the final installment of our series with Dr. Jules White, award-winning computer science professor and Vanderbilt’s Senior Advisor on Generative AI, we’re focusing on hands-on prompting techniques. With his distinct blend of technical expertise and visual arts background, Dr. White has shown how AI can be a collaborative partner in work, education, and the creative process. Here, he shares actionable techniques that reveal how even small adjustments to your prompting approach can yield powerful results. 

On taking ownership of your AI learning

While many employers are ramping AI adoption in the workplace, Dr. White suggests that taking ownership of your learning by experimenting outside the workplace can prompt meaningful breakthroughs. “You can rely on your employer to help you figure it out, but my recommendation is to invest in yourself,” he says. By focusing on creative, personal applications, you can gain a deeper understanding of how GenAI complements your processes without the constraints of workplace guidelines. For example, Dr. White’s wife uses AI to streamline their cooking routines. 

One day, while chatting with a friend, she mentioned how she’d used AI to create a new recipe. Her friend’s reaction was skeptical: “Why on earth would you ever use ChatGPT to generate a recipe? Why wouldn’t you just go look it up on a blog or in a cookbook?” This realization that AI could do things that traditional means like cookbooks and blogs couldn’t sparked Dr. White’s inspiration for his ChatGPT Meal Planning course. 

“When you show up at the end of a long day and you’re tired, and you don’t want to cook whatever you had planned, no blog or website can fix or plan around that. But I can give ChatGPT a screenshot of my calendar and it can recognize that I’m really busy on these two days, so I won’t want a complicated recipe. Or, if you’ve got a limited set of options in your fridge, and you snap a picture of what you actually have left and say, ‘Give me a really creative recipe that has these parameters,’ it can do it.”

These types of applications, he says, demonstrate how people can use GenAI more thoughtfully and effectively based on their personal lives and experiences. 

Expert-recommended prompting technique: the Keen Pattern

Dr. White has found success using a technique he learned from friend and AI consultant Shawn Keen, which he later adapted into the quicker version he now calls the “Keen Pattern” in his classes. This straightforward, two-step process has become a go-to for Dr. White for generating better outputs by aligning results with specific goals. 

1. Step one: Clearly define the goal and its qualities. “[Thing] is what I’m trying to do or create,” followed by an exploration of how the outcome will be evaluated. For example, he might ask, “What would our goal be for a really good [thing]?” or “What are the ideal qualities of [the thing]?”

2. Step two: Instruct the AI to create something based on those characteristics. “Go and create a [thing] that has those qualities.” 

It’s a great way to fine-tune AI results and can even be applied to planning by asking, “How would you do this?” and then instructing the AI to run with the plan it just created. This method, Dr. White explains, not only helps clarify the goal but also creates an opportunity to adjust and refine the output. 

“When I see the goals laid out, it also gives me an opportunity to edit it and say, ‘Oh, I don’t care about that. But I do care about this thing that you didn’t include.’ This helps me to start thinking more in terms of goals and outcomes I’m trying to achieve, and other things I might be trying to achieve that I hadn’t thought of.”  

Dr. White shares a personal "Aha!" moment that transformed his thinking about persona patterns.

On experimenting with persona patterns

A persona pattern is a prompting technique that helps you get creative with AI by instructing it to take on a specific character or role. Using persona patterns helps guide the AI’s output by narrowing the scope of its perspective to “be” something specific, like a detective, a clown, or even a machine under attack. When Dr. White observed people telling AI, “Act as a computer,” it dramatically shifted his perspective on the power of the persona. 

“I suddenly realized, ‘Oh, wait! A persona can be anything. You can dream up a simulation by describing the persona of the thing that you want to simulate,” he says. 

He tested this approach in his cybersecurity class, instructing the AI to act as a computer that had been the victim of a cyberattack. The result led to an “Aha” moment.

“What's interesting is that it would dream up things that had been done to that computer during a cyberattack that made it respond differently than normal. This was an ‘Aha!’ moment for me, realizing a persona could be much more than just a human being.” 

A lot of times, we resist change, and we fear change, but change is the definition of life.

On change and the future with AI

By rethinking the way we approach prompts, we can not only capitalize on AI’s ever-growing technical capabilities but also use it to amplify our own. Dr. White's passion for AI is driven by the realization that we’re just scratching the surface. "What keeps me in this field," he says, "is that we haven’t even begun to fully tap into the capabilities of the first version of ChatGPT, yet we've rocketed off to all these other versions. The amount of exploration that we have to do at this unique point in time, I feel like I'm just lucky enough to be experiencing a fundamental change in what humans and computers can do.” 

While we may be experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime moment with AI, Dr. White acknowledges how easy it can be to feel fearful and pull back from technological advancements.

“A lot of times, we resist change, and we fear change, but change is the definition of life,” he says. “All this movement is injecting more life into what we do. It's different than we might expect, it’s harder to predict, but it’s what makes things exciting. We should embrace and be excited about what's happening and all the potential and the creativity that's going to take place.”

Learn more ways to prompt creativity with Dr. Jules White

In Vanderbilt University’s Prompt Engineering Specialization with Dr. White, you’ll learn to increase the quality of AI outputs in and out of the workplace for more trustworthy results that build upon, rather than replace, your creative vision. 

To practice using ChatGPT to enhance your everyday routine, try ChatGPT Meal Planning: Effortlessly Plan and Cook with AI. 

If you haven’t yet, be sure to check out the other articles in this series: AI Creativity Unleashed: Expert Insights from Vanderbilt’s Dr. Jules White to learn more about how AI can reinforce your creative process and Reimagining Work and Learning with AI: Expert Insights from Dr. Jules White to explore AI’s impact on how we learn and work. Want to go deeper? Keep exploring the exciting world of prompt engineering with Dr. White in our full video interview.