Prompt Smells: An Omen for Undesirable Generative AI Outputs
Krishna Ronanki Beatriz Cabrero-Daniel Christian Berger
Recent Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) trends focus on various
applications, including creating stories, illustrations, poems, articles,
computer code, music compositions, and videos. Extrinsic hallucinations are a
critical limitation of such GenAI, which can lead to significant challenges in
achieving and maintaining the trustworthiness of GenAI. In this paper, we
propose two new concepts that we believe will aid the research community in
addressing limitations associated with the application of GenAI models. First,
we propose a definition for the "desirability" of GenAI outputs and three
factors which are observed to influence it. Second, drawing inspiration from
Martin Fowler's code smells, we propose the concept of "prompt smells" and the
adverse effects they are observed to have on the desirability of GenAI outputs.
We expect our work will contribute to the ongoing conversation about the
desirability of GenAI outputs and help advance the field in a meaningful way.