2023 Prompt Design Contest Winners

Prompt Engineer Contest

‍The Pickaxe Prompt Design Contest is over! The contest was a celebration of the emerging art of prompt design, the skill of nudging persuading, and leading AI models towards desired behavior. As we tell so many people everyday,

"Writing prompts is not an exact science, it’s an art."

And some people are really good at it.

Prompt design is a quickly emerging field with people discovering new techniques all the time. Skilled prompt designers are debating how to write the best, most effective prompts at forums like the Prompt Design subreddit. Meanwhile, Discord servers organized around prompt engineering are popping up all the time. Inside, members trade prompts and tips. If you're a complete beginner and want to know some simple best practices, check out these basic principles of prompt design.

But this contest wasn't for beginners. Many prompts were entered, but only the top 10 most-used advanced to the final round to be evaluated by our panel of esteemed judges. For a quick recap of the top 10 prompts, you can check out the full list here.

The judges pored over the prompts, turned in their votes, and now we now have our winners. The judges include Matt Wolfe, the popular youtuber who educates millions of viewers every month about new AI tools, Pete Huang, co-editor and co-founder of the Neuron newsletter, Souki Mehdaoui, filmmaker and AI consultant, AI super TikTokker Riley Brown, and AI artist & Twitter sensation Dreaming Tulpa.

So let’s get into the winners!

People’s Choice Award (most uses)

Dyllen Nellis, a celebrity in her own right for starting a successful business out of her college dorm room, is now a celebrity prompt engineer! Dyllen’s AI Passion Project Generator amassed more uses than any other entry. She won the People's Choice Award for the most popular and most-used pickaxe entered into the competition.

Dyllen is quite an impressive person. In fact, we will be featuring her unique use of Pickaxe in an upcoming blog. You can check out her college counseling business and other entrepreneurial projects here. In her college admissions counseling business, she uses her AI Passion Project generator as a lead gen magnet, giving users free access in exchange for their email.

Check out her tool below!

‍Best Chatbot Award (chatbot with most judge votes)‍

The best chatbot is the Talk to a Muse chatbot created by Circe. This chatbot helps you enjoy any sensory experiences by giving you guided instructions.

Gulp down your coffee too fast? Talk to the muse about it. It will tell you to relax, enjoy the aroma, savor the test, examine the color, and savor in every small detail. This chatbot helps you live in the moment and by breaking down even simple actions into rich experiences.

For being the chatbot-based pickaxe that got the most votes from judges, Talk to a Muse wins the best chatbot award! Congratulations Circe!

You can talk to the muse below!

Best Overall (pickaxe with most judge votes)

The best overall prompt, as judged by our judge panel, was the Reverse Prompt Engineer created by Ian Eck. Ian is actually a designer at Pickaxe. "What!? A Pickaxe employee won best overall?" It's weird, but yes! The Reverse Prompt Engineer garnered a landslide victory in vote totals from the judges. Importantly, none of the judges are affiliated with Pickaxe. Ian is a prompt aficionado, a fixture of the r/promptdesign community and spends more time than anyone messing around with prompt design. When he cooked up his Reverse Prompt Engineer, reportedly he didn’t sleep the next day. He just reverse engineered different prompts.

This pickaxe reverse engineers prompts based on outputs. Feed it any text and it will write a prompt that could produce it. This is a cool tool in the quickly emerging category of "meta prompts", or prompts that produce other prompts. It's a useful tool for discovering good prompt design techniques. If you're having trouble getting a model to behave, try entering the desired output into the Reverse Prompt Engineer. It will give you inspiration for a prompt that could produce it.

Reverse engineer a prompt below!

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Well, that's a wrap on the 2023 Pickaxe Prompt Design Contest. Congratulations to the winner. To make your own prompt-powered app, start creating on Pickaxe today for free.

2023 Prompt Design Contest Winners

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