Crafting Creativity: How Professionals Shape AI Outputs Through Prompt Engineering

The growing use of generative AI in professional work has renewed debates over human agency, authorship, and creative contribution. While prompt engineering is often described as a technical operation, its meaning varies across professional contexts. This study investigates how legal, technical, and creative professionals interpret and evaluate prompting as a form of human input in generative AI interaction. Using a sequential mixed methods design, we surveyed 91 professionals on perceptions of controllability, authorship, and contribution, then conducted focus group interviews to examine how occupational norms shape interpretations of creative input. Findings reveal systematic differences across domains: legal professionals stressed procedural rigor and questioned claims of human authorship; technical professionals framed prompting as strategic system design; creative professionals emphasized expressive authorship and co-creation. These divergent perspectives demonstrate that prompt engineering cannot be assessed through uniform criteria highlighting the need for context-sensitive approaches to evaluating human contribution in human–AI interaction.