You can be a prompt engineer or an iterative prompt artist

In my own words:

There are at least two ways to interact with AI.

You could act like an engineer: optimize your prompts, make sure that you expend the least amount of effort in order to get the desired result.

Or, you act like an artist and take the emotional route. You prompt iteratively, growing the conversation, refining, iterating, and eventually finding (through a long and winding road) the output you wanted.

blog post - scientist or artist

From Mark A. Curcher on LinkedIn:

An interesting post and worthy of some serious consideration. Briefly, a engineer tends to approach things in an instrumental way, seeking technological solutions that use science and mathematics to achieve an intended outcome.

An artist might use a variety of techniques and approaches to evocate an emotional response or to communicate, express aesthetic ideas or simply provoke.

Perhaps there are times when someone wants to use GAI as an engineer and other times as an artist, it might be situational and contextual. I also see the possibility that this might be viewed as a craft as well.

The engineering frame suggests that the there is a predictability, a level of controllability to writing prompts and the outcomes that will be produced. A prompt engineer is surely unlikely to want to be surprised by an output anymore than being surprised that a bridge or building falls down in unpredictable ways. An artist is likely to want to see what kind of response is produced and how that relates to them and their lived experience of the world and other who see the response.

As I sit and reflect on this as I write and respond, I think it depends what you are doing and why you are doing it.