How Literary Allusions can Help Prompt AI

Poetry is whisky and prose beer, so the saying goes, and it’s a stronger acquired taste. Literary allusions are even stronger and harder to acquire, as they pull in the emotional weight of another passage, personality, or even entire work into another, saying more with a few words than would ordinarily be possible.

When writing prompts for AI chatbots, we can use allusions to effectively compress our instructions into fewer words. Question me like Socrates. Write like Hemingway.