Ready for a new AI discipline? Dubai hosts prompt engineering contest for generative AI enthusiasts

The Global Prompt Engineering Championship, the largest competition of its kind in the world, took place in Dubai from May 20 to 21, inviting generative artificial intelligence (AI) enthusiasts from around the globe to showcase their skills and unleash their creativity.

Highlighting one of the most promising skills of the future, the event set the stage for 30 competitors from 13 countries, selected from thousands of entries worldwide.

Prompt engineering is a process in AI, particularly in the context of natural language processing (NLP) models, where the input prompts are carefully crafted to elicit the desired response or behavior from the AI. It involves designing and optimizing the queries or instructions given to AI models, such as GPT-4, to achieve specific outputs or solve tasks effectively.

During the two-day competition, prompt engineers applied AI models to generate creative works based on specific themes within set time limits to showcase how human creativity is integrated with the latest technological advancements.

The participants vied in art, literature and coding, and the winners were awarded a share of 1 million dirhams (over $270,000).

"What we're looking for is someone who can really clearly give the machine a prompt, who can have a conversation with the machine to refine the final output," Benedetta Ghione, executive director of Art Dubai and a judge for the art category, told CGTN. "We look at the final result, and we're looking for something that is innovative, striking, feels different and fresh."

"We believe that prompt engineering will be one of the major skill sets in the future that will allow people to be able to use AI in the right format," said Dubai Future Foundation Deputy CEO Abdulaziz Aljaziri. "So the more we build people's prompt engineering skills, the better the outcomes of what we're creating will be."

For participants, although prompt engineering is a relatively new discipline, it holds great potential for future development, especially with the booming growth of AI technology.

"I think the future of Prompt Engineering is going to be more about people that have a really good taste and a good eye for what works and what doesn't work," Megan Fowkes, champion in art category, shared her insights.

"Anybody can do it. But it's all about the vision and the idea and the concept behind whatever it is you're creating," she added.