AI literacy and its implications for prompt engineering strategies

Artificial intelligence technologies are rapidly advancing. As part of this development, large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used when humans interact with systems based on artificial intelligence (AI), posing both new opportunities and challenges. When interacting with LLM-based AI system in a goal-directed manner, prompt engineering has evolved as a skill of formulating precise and well-structured instructions to elicit desired responses or information from the LLM, optimizing the effectiveness of the interaction. However, research on the perspectives of non-experts using LLM-based AI systems through prompt engineering and on how AI literacy affects prompting behavior is lacking. This aspect is particularly important when considering the implications of LLMs in the context of higher education. In this present study, we address this issue, introduce a skill-based approach to prompt engineering, and explicitly consider the role of non-experts' AI literacy (students) in their prompt engineering skills. We also provide qualitative insights into students’ intuitive behaviors towards LLM-based AI systems. The results show that higher-quality prompt engineering skills predict the quality of LLM output, suggesting that prompt engineering is indeed a required skill for the goal-directed use of generative AI tools. In addition, the results show that certain aspects of AI literacy can play a role in higher quality prompt engineering and targeted adaptation of LLMs within education. We, therefore, argue for the integration of AI educational content into current curricula to enable a hybrid intelligent society in which students can effectively use generative AI tools such as ChatGPT.