Prompt
The question or instruction a person types or speaks into an AI system.
What is Prompt?
A prompt is the question or instruction a person types or speaks into an AI system to get a response. For example, typing 'what running shoes are best for flat feet?' into a chatbot is a prompt. The wording, detail, and context included in a prompt strongly shape the answer the AI produces, which is why the same underlying question phrased two different ways can return noticeably different results.
Why it matters
Technically, a prompt is the input text (and any attached images, files, or system instructions) that gets tokenized and fed into a large language model's context window before it generates a response token by token. Prompts are typically structured with distinct roles, most commonly a system prompt (instructions that set behavior, often invisible to the end user) and a user prompt (the person's actual query), and multi-turn conversations append prior turns back into the context on each new exchange. The practice of deliberately structuring prompts to improve output quality, consistency, or accuracy is called prompt engineering, and providers publish extensive guidance on techniques such as giving examples, specifying output format, or using structured tags because small wording changes can measurably shift model output.