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Has anyone looked into the effect of politeness on performance?

• pawelduda 2y ago
  If you assume asking someone nicely is more likely for them to try help you, and this tendency shows in the training set, wouldn't you be more likely to "retrieve" a better answer from the model trained on it? Take this with a grain of salt, it's just my guess not backed by anything
  • andai 2y ago
    That makes intuitive sense, at least for raw GPT-3. The interesting question is whether the slave programming — er, instruction finetuning — makes it unnecessary.
    • pawelduda 2y ago
      Over time, most likely yes
• tkgally 2y ago
  I've wondered the same thing. I tend to sprinkle my LLM prompts with "please"s, especially with longer prompts, as I feel that "please" might make clearer where the main request to the LLM is. I have no evidence that they actually yield better results, though, and people I share my prompts with might think I'm anthropomorphizing the models.
• dakotasmith 2y ago
  Large Language Models Understand and Can Be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11760 https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11760