What You Say = What You Want? Teaching Humans to Articulate Requirements for LLMs

Prompting ChatGPT to achieve complex goals (e.g., creating a customer support chatbot) often demands meticulous prompt engineering, including aspects like fluent writing and chain-of-thought techniques. While emerging prompt optimizers can automatically refine many of these aspects, we argue that clearly conveying customized requirements (e.g., how to handle diverse inputs) remains a human-centric challenge. In this work, we introduce Requirement-Oriented Prompt Engineering (ROPE), a paradigm that focuses human attention on generating clear, complete requirements during prompting. We implement ROPE through an assessment and training suite that provides deliberate practice with LLM-generated feedback. In a study with 30 novices, we show that requirement-focused training doubles novices' prompting performance, significantly outperforming conventional prompt engineering training and prompt optimization. We also demonstrate that high-quality LLM outputs are directly tied to the quality of input requirements. Our work paves the way for more effective task delegation in human-LLM collaborative prompting.

PortfolioMentor: Multimodal Generative AI Companion for Learning and Crafting Interactive Digital Art Portfolios

Digital art portfolios serve as impactful mediums for artists to convey their visions, weaving together visuals, audio, interactions, and narratives. However, without technical backgrounds, design students often find it challenging to translate creative ideas into tangible codes and designs, given the lack of tailored resources for the non-technical, academic support in art schools, and a comprehensive guiding tool throughout the mentally demanding process. Recognizing the role of companionship in code learning and leveraging generative AI models' capabilities in supporting creative tasks, we present PortfolioMentor, a coding companion chatbot for IDEs. This tool guides and collaborates with students through proactive suggestions and responsible Q&As for learning, inspiration, and support. In detail, the system starts with the understanding of the task and artist's visions, follows the co-creation of visual illustrations, audio or music suggestions and files, click-scroll effects for interactions, and creative vision conceptualization, and finally synthesizes these facets into a polished interactive digital portfolio.