What is Artificial Social Intelligence?

You have likely heard of "Social Intelligence" before. It refers to your ability to understand and navigate social interactions. Generally, being more socially intelligent means you are a better communicator and can express your ideas more clearly to other people, as well as better understand their responses.

We call people with high social intelligence "Socially Intelligent". But we do have a term for those who are highly skilled at communicating with AIs: Prompt Engineers!

Prompt engineers spend their time crafting effective messages for AIs, designing clear prompts, interpreting AIs' responses, and refining their prompts for better results.

When someone is good at prompt engineering, they are skilled at communicating with the AI. I term this skill artificial social intelligence.

Artificial Social Intelligence is the ability of a human or other conscious being to understand how to clearly communicate with artificially intelligent systems.

It’s similar to social intelligence between humans but focuses on interactions between humans and AI.

How Can You Use Your Artificial Social Intelligence?

Think of artificial social intelligence as being great at prompt engineering. You can use your artificial social intelligence to create better prompts for AI systems, enabling more accurate, relevant, and creative outputs. This skill can be applied to a wide range of tasks—automating workflows, generating content (essays and articles), problem-solving, and even building complex AI-driven applications.

How Can You Evaluate Artificial Social Intelligence?

Unlike IQ or EQ, we don’t yet have a formal measure for artificial social intelligence (maybe AIQ?). Experience in prompt engineering and knowledge of prompting techniques are key indicators, but there’s no established metric to evaluate your Artificial Social Intelligence.

When I interview people for prompt engineering positions, I often assess the clarity and precision of their prompts, the consistency of AI outputs, and how well they understand and adapt to the AI's responses.

If you are looking to evaluate for artificial social intelligence, just like for IQ (for general intelligence) and EQ (for emotional intelligence), you might develop metrics based on problem-solving efficiency, creativity, and adaptability in human-AI interaction.

How Can You Improve Your Artificial Social Intelligence?

You can improve your artificial social intelligence by reading Learn Prompting docs, taking courses on Generative AI, and reading research papers on prompting.

This helps build your knowledge of prompting overall, but you also need to apply it to experimenting with Generative AI models, analyzing the outputs, and refining your approach. Engaging in community discussion and experimenting with different AI tools can also enhance your artificial social intelligence.

You can cite this work as follows:

@article{asi2024Schulhoff,
  Title = { What is Artificial Social Intelligence?},
  Author = {Sander Schulhoff},
  Year = {2024},
  url={https://learnprompting.org/blog/asi}
}

Sander Schulhoff

Sander Schulhoff is the Founder of Learn Prompting and an ML Researcher at the University of Maryland. He created the first open-source Prompt Engineering guide, reaching 3M+ people and teaching them to use tools like ChatGPT. Sander also led a team behind Prompt Report, the most comprehensive study of prompting ever done, co-authored with researchers from the University of Maryland, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Princeton, Stanford, and other leading institutions. This 76-page survey analyzed 1,500+ academic papers and covered 200+ prompting techniques.