Humanities skills become essential for AI prompting

As generative AI transforms content creation, the ability to craft precise prompts is becoming a critical skill, requiring expertise from humanities disciplines such as linguistics, philosophy, and law. The article argues that effective prompting—the process of guiding AI to produce desired outputs—demands a rich vocabulary, contextual understanding, and the ability to specify tone, structure, and role-play scenarios. Examples include drafting a fundraising letter for the Museo Civico demoetnoantropologico della Paglia e dell'Intreccio in Signa, Florence, which requires specialized terms like 'conservatrice', 'demoetnoantropologico', 'rafia', and 'leghorn'. The author, Irene Sanesi, a chartered accountant and partner at BBS-pro Ballerini Sanesi, warns that those who neglect to feed AI with quality data risk others supplying fake information. The piece concludes by urging new humanists and linguists to embrace the challenge of prompting, noting that even engineers need such expertise.