Tell the AI who it is, and everything changes
When you ask an AI a question with no instructions, you get a generic answer. When you start your prompt by giving it a role, a persona, an identity, the tone, the vocabulary, and the level of detail all shift at once. This technique is called role prompting, and it is one of the most powerful tools in prompt engineering. Today you try out different roles on a topic of your choice and watch how each one reshapes the response.
A role works because an AI generates text by following patterns it learned from huge amounts of human writing. Naming a role like surgeon, tortoise, or detective switches on a whole cluster of those patterns at once, which is why one good role instruction can do the work of ten separate style instructions. It is also a useful reminder that an AI sounding like an expert is not the same as it being one.