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In an online experiment with N = 1893 participants, we collected and analyzed over 18,000 prompts and over 300,000 images to explore how the importance of prompting will change as the capabilities of generative AI models continue to improve. Each participant in our experiment was randomly and blindly assigned to use one of three text-to-image diffusion models: DALL-E 2, its more advanced successor DALL-E 3, or a version of DALL-E 3 with automatic prompt revision. Participants were then asked to write prompts to reproduce a target image as closely as possible in 10 consecutive tries. We find that task performance was higher for participants using DALL-E 3 than for those using DALL-E 2. This performance gap corresponds to a noticeable difference in the similarity of participants' images to their target images, and was caused in equal measure by: (1) the increased technical capabilities of DALL-E 3, and (2) endogenous changes in participants' prompting in response to these increased capabilities. More specifically, despite being blind to the model they were assigned, participants assigned to DALL-E 3 wrote longer prompts that were more semantically similar to each other and contained a greater number of descriptive words. Furthermore, while participants assigned to DALL-E 3 with prompt revision still outperformed those assigned to DALL-E 2, automatic prompt revision reduced the benefits of using DALL-E 3 by 58\%. Taken together, our results suggest that as models continue to progress, people will continue to adapt their prompts to take advantage of new models' capabilities.

We present an approach for automatically generating and testing, in silico, social scientific hypotheses. This automation is made possible by recent advances in large language models (LLM), but the key feature of the approach is the use of structural causal models. Structural causal models provide a language to state hypotheses, a blueprint for constructing LLM-based agents, an experimental design, and a plan for data analysis. The fitted structural causal model becomes an object available for prediction or the planning of follow-on experiments. We demonstrate the approach with several scenarios: a negotiation, a bail hearing, a job interview, and an auction. In each case, causal relationships are both proposed and tested by the system, finding evidence for some and not others. We provide evidence that the insights from these simulations of social interactions are not available to the LLM purely through direct elicitation. When given its proposed structural causal model for each scenario, the LLM is good at predicting the signs of estimated effects, but it cannot reliably predict the magnitudes of those estimates. In the auction experiment, the in silico simulation results closely match the predictions of auction theory, but elicited predictions of the clearing prices from the LLM are inaccurate. However, the LLM's predictions are dramatically improved if the model can condition on the fitted structural causal model. In short, the LLM knows more than it can (immediately) tell.