From Turban to Transformer: Is Carnac the Magnificent the Original GPT Prompt Engineer?

Before AI hallucinated responses to our prompts, we had a man in a turban doing essentially the same thing on national television. The difference? One curses you when you laugh at wrong answers.

The Magnificent One: A Brief History

If you aren’t Gen-X or prior, you might have missed one of television's most iconic recurring comedy bits (YouTube is your friend.) For nearly three decades, Johnny Carson donned an elaborate feathered turban and cape to transform into "Carnac the Magnificent" – a mystic from the East with supposed psychic powers. This character, introduced in 1964, became one of Carson's most beloved personas on The Tonight Show.

The premise was delightfully simple yet brilliantly executed. Carnac would emerge from behind the curtain (inevitably stumbling on the step in front of the desk), accompanied by exotic music. His loyal sidekick Ed McMahon would then bombastically introduce him as "the great seer, soothsayer, and sage". McMahon would present Carnac with "hermetically sealed" envelopes that had been "kept in a mayonnaise jar on Funk and Wagnalls' porch since noon today."

Here's where the magic happened: Carnac would hold an envelope to his forehead, divine the answer to an unseen question inside, announce it to the audience, and then open the envelope to reveal the question. The comedy came from the unexpected connection between the seemingly straightforward answer and the surprising question. For instance, when Carnac announced "Sis boom bah," the question turned out to be "Describe the sound made when a sheep explodes.”

Other classics included "Gatorade" (What does an alligator get on welfare?), “UCLA" (What happens when there isn't any smog - “You see LA”), or "Denominator" (Who is de person who makes de speech to nominate a political candidate). If the audience groaned at a particularly bad pun, Carnac would often respond with an elaborate curse like "May a diseased yak drop his cud in your hooped skirt.”

The Psychic and The Prompt: More Similar Than You Think

As I sit here in 2025, watching tech executives fumble through GPT prompt engineering workshops, I can't help but see the parallels between Carnac's act and our modern AI interactions. In both cases, we're dealing with a system that produces answers based on hidden information – though admittedly, GPT's training data is slightly larger than what was in those hermetically sealed envelopes.

Carnac's routine was essentially reverse-engineered comedy – starting with the punchline and working backward to the setup. This is remarkably similar to zero-shot prompting, where we provide a language model with instructions but no examples, trusting its pre-training to generate appropriate responses. When you ask ChatGPT to "Classify the sentiment of the following text as positive, neutral, or negative," you're essentially playing McMahon to the AI's Carnac.

The difference, of course, is that Carnac already knew both the answer and question (Carson's writers prepared them in advance), while we're genuinely asking GPTs to generate novel responses. But the theatrical element remains – we're still putting faith in a mysterious black box process that somehow "knows" things without being explicitly taught each specific task.

Engineering the Perfect Prompt: Less Turban, More Technique

Where Carnac relied on comedic timing and a feathered headdress, modern prompt engineering requires a bit more finesse. We've evolved from simple question-answer formats to sophisticated techniques like few-shot prompting, where we provide the model with examples to guide its responses.

Think of it this way: if Carnac had used few-shot prompting, McMahon might have first shown him a few example envelope pairs to "calibrate" his psychic powers before the main performance. "Here's how you've answered previous questions, Great Carnac, now divine this new one!"

The key elements of effective prompting – clarity, context, precision, and role assignment – aren't so different from what made Carnac's bit work. Both rely on a clear format, established context, and precise wording to get the desired result. The main difference is that instead of aiming for laughs, we're trying to extract useful business intelligence or customer service solutions.

From Comedy to Customer Experience: The AI Revolution

For Customer Experience executives looking to implement GPT technologies, there's a lot to learn from Carnac's approach. Just as Carson's character had a consistent format and presentation that audiences came to expect, your AI implementations need clear frameworks and boundaries to be effective.

The benefits are substantial. AI-powered customer service can provide contextualized experiences through data analysis, enable real-time solutions via chatbots, and streamline operations through automation. Companies like Unity have successfully deflected thousands of support tickets and boosted customer satisfaction scores to 93% using AI implementations.

But unlike Carnac, who could curse the audience when things went wrong, your AI systems need to gracefully handle edge cases and unexpected inputs. This is where sophisticated prompt engineering becomes crucial – designing your prompts to guide the AI toward helpful responses even when faced with ambiguous requests.

Becoming Your Own Magnificent One

So here's my challenge to you, dear Customer Experience executive: Channel your inner Carnac. Experiment with different prompting techniques. Try zero-shot prompting for straightforward tasks, and few-shot prompting when you need more nuanced responses. Assign your AI a specific role or persona to guide its tone and approach.

Remember that like Carnac's envelopes, the quality of your output depends entirely on how you frame the input. A well-crafted prompt is the difference between a response that makes your customers groan and one that genuinely solves their problems.

Unlike Carson's character, which remained largely unchanged for decades, the field of AI and prompt engineering is evolving rapidly. What works today might not work tomorrow. But the fundamental principles – clarity, context, and understanding your audience – remain constant.

So don your metaphorical turban, hold that customer query to your forehead, and divine the perfect response. Just try not to stumble on your way to the desk – and maybe skip the elaborate curses when things don't go as planned.

May your prompts be clear, your responses relevant, and your customer satisfaction scores ever-increasing. The Great Carnac has spoken!