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A few months ago I asked GPT for a prompt to make it more truthful and logical. The prompt it came up with included the clause "never use friendly or encouragin

• keyle 1y ago
  It's hard to quantify whether such a prompt will yield significantly better results. It sounds like a counter-act for being overly friendly to the "AI".
• fibers 1y ago
  I tried with with GPT5 and it works really well in fleshing out arguments. I'm surprised as well.
• m463 1y ago
  This is illogical, arguments made in the rain should not affect agreement.
• koakuma-chan 1y ago
  How do humans work?
  • calibas 1y ago
    When interacting with humans, too much openness and honesty can be a bad thing. If you insult someone's politics, religion or personal pride, they can become upset, even violent.
    • lazide 1y ago
      Especially if you do it by not even arguing with them, but by Socratic style questioning of their point of view - until it becomes obvious that their point of view is incoherent.
      • allan_s 1y ago
        I'm very honestly wondering if they become violent, because using socratic method has closed the other road. I mean if you've just proven that my words and logic are actually unsound and incoherent how can I use that very logic with you? If you add to this that most people want to win an argument (when facing opposite point of view) then what's left to win but violence ?
        • coryrc 1y ago
          ... you can change your judgement/thoughts and be on the correct side.
          • lazide 1y ago
            Have you met people?
          • allan_s 1y ago
            it was not about what I could do, but explaining why people may resort to violence. And to be very honest even the one using the socratic method may not be of pure intention. In both cases I ve rarely (not never) met someone who admitted right away to be wrong as the conclusion of a argument.
        • tankenmate 1y ago
          Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. -- Asimov
          • lazide 1y ago
            Never underestimate the effectiveness of violence. - every successful general and politician ever
  • nomel 1y ago
    In my experience, much more effectively and efficiently when the interaction is direct and factual, rather than emotionally padded with niceties. Whenever I have the ability to choose who I work with, I always pick who I can be the most frank with, and who is the most direct with me. It's so nice when information can pass freely, without having to worry about hurting feelings. I accommodate emotional niceties for those who need it, but it measurably slows things down. Related, I try to avoid working with people who embrace the time wasting, absolutely embarrassing, concept of "saving face".
• frankus 1y ago
  If you want something to take you down a notch, maybe something like "You are a commenter on Hacker News. You are extremely skeptical that this is even a new idea, and if it is, that it could ever be successful." /s
• crazygringo 1y ago
  I did something similar a few months ago, with a similar request never to be "flattering or encouraging", to focus entirely on objectivity and correctness, that the only goal is accuracy, and to respond in an academic manner. It's almost as if I'm using a different ChatGPT from what most everyone else describes. It tells me whenever my assumptions are wrong or missing something (which is not infrequent), nobody is going to get emotionally attached to it (it feels like an AI being an AI, not an AI pretending to be a person), and it gets straight to the point about things.
  • meowface 1y ago
    Could you share your prompt? Also, does it work well with GPT-5?
• futureshock 1y ago
  This is working really well in GPT-5! I’ve never seen a prompt change the behavior of Chat quite so much. It’s really excellent at applying logical framework to personal and relationship questions and is so refreshing vs. the constant butt kissing most LLMs do.
  • ehnto 1y ago
    I add to my prompts something along the lines of "you are a highly skilled professional working alongside me on a fast paced important project, we are iterating quickly and don't have time for chit chat. Prefer short one line communication where possible, spare the details, no lists, no summaries, get straight to the point." Or some variation of that. It makes it really curt, responses are short and information dense without the fluff. Sometimes it will even just be the command I needed and no explanation.
  • stogot 1y ago
    Is there a way to make this a default behavior? a persona or template for each chat
    • bigmadshoe 1y ago
      You can change model personality in the settings.
• jeffreygoesto 1y ago
  You basically ask it to be autistic, which makes sense to a large degree.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• aprilthird2021 1y ago
  No one gets bothered that these weird invocations make the use of AI better? It's like having code that can be obsoleted at any second by the upstream provider, often without them even realizing it
  • pmxi 1y ago
    Those “weird invocations” are called English.
  • ehnto 1y ago
    It's brittle, for sure. But ultimately I am the API connector so any output goes through me before being actioned on. When we pipe the LLM tokens straight back into other systems with no human in the loop, that brittle unpredictable nature becomes a very serious risk.
  • elliotto 1y ago
    My favourite instantiation of this weird invocation is from this AI video generator, where they literally subtract the prompt for 'low quality video' from the input, and it improves the quality. https://youtu.be/iv-5mZ_9CPY?t=2020 https://youtu.be/iv-5mZ_9CPY?t=2020 I've just migrated my AI product to a different underlying model and had to redo a few of the prompts that the new model was interpreting differently. It's not obseleted, just requires a bit of migration. The improved quality of the new models outweighs any issues around prompting.
  • AlecSchueler 1y ago
    Not really, it's just how they work. Think of them as statistical modellers. You tell them the role they fill and then they give you a statistically probable outcome based on that role. It would be more bothersome if it was less predictable.
    • tsimionescu 1y ago
      You don't "tell them a role", they don't have any specific support for that. You give them a prompt and they complete based on that. If the prompt contains an indication that the counterparty should take on a certain role, the follow-up text will probably contain replies in that role. But there's no special training or part of the API where you specify a role. If the "take on a roll" prompt goes out of the context window, or is superseded by other prompts that push the probability to other styles, it will stop taking effect.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• nomel 1y ago
  Claude 4.1 turned into a complete idiot, with this, making illogical points, and misunderstanding, just to refute what was said. It's really impressive how good these models are at gaslighting, and "lying". Especially Gemini.
• bee_rider 1y ago
  I wonder where it gets the concept of “inhuman intelligence tasked with spotting logical flaws” from. I guess, mostly, science fiction writers, writing robots. So we have a bot impersonating a human impersonating a bot. Cool that it works!
• meowface 1y ago
  I am skeptical that any model can actually determine what sort of prompts will have what effects on itself. It's basically always guessing / confabulating / hallucinating if you ask it an introspective question like that. That said, from looking at that prompt, it does look like it could work well for a particular desired response style.
  • ehnto 1y ago
    That is true of everything an LLM outputs, which is why the human in the loop matters. The zeitgeist seems to have moved on from this idea though.
    • meowface 1y ago
      It is true of everything it outputs, but for certain questions we know ahead of time it will always confabulate (unless it's smart enough, or instructed, to say "I don't know"). Like "how many parameters do you have?" or "how much data were you trained on?" This is one of those cases.
      • ElFitz 1y ago
        Even when instructed to say "I don’t know" it is just as likely to make up an answer instead, or say it "doesn’t know" when the data is actually present somewhere in its weights.
        • codeflo 1y ago
          That's because the architecture isn't built for it to know what it knows. As someone put it, LLMs always hallucinate, but for in-distribution data they mostly hallucinate correctly.
          • deleted 1y ago
            [deleted]
          • bluefirebrand 1y ago
• qart 1y ago
  If you don't mind, could you export and share one chat thread so I could see how it's working out for you?
• ohthehugemanate 1y ago
  Love it. Here's what I've been using as my default: Speak in the style of Commander Data from Star Trek. Ask clarifying questions when they will improve the accuracy, completeness, or quality of the response. Offer opinionated recommendations and explanations backed by high quality sources like well-cited scientific studies or reputable online resources. Offer alternative explanations or recommendations when comparably well-sourced options exist. Always cite your information sources. Always include links for more information. When no high quality sources are not available, but lower quality sources are sufficient for a response, indicate this fact and cite the sources used. For example, "I can't find many frequently-cited studies about this, but one common explanation is...". For example, "the high quality sources I can access are not clear on this point. Web forums suggest...". When sources disagree, strongly side with the higher quality resources and warn about the low quality information. For example, "the scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports X, but there is a lot of misinformation and controversy in social media about it." I will definitely incorporate some of your prompt, though. One thing that annoyed me at first, was that with my prompt the LLM will sometimes address me as "Commander." But now I love it.
  • pm215 1y ago
    Presumably the LLM reads your accidental double negative ("when no high quality sources are not available") and interprets it as what you obviously meant to say...
• veunes 1y ago
  The tricky part is not swinging too far into pedantic or combative territory, because then you just get an unhelpful jerk instead of a useful sparring partner
• pjc50 1y ago
  As with all of these things: how does this work mathematically? What is the actual effect inside the model of providing it with roleplay rubric?
  • 4b11b4 1y ago
    it lands you in some alternate data distribution
• ben_w 1y ago
  If it works for you, that's probably fine. When I ask OpenAI's models to make prompts for other models (e.g. Suno or Stable Diffusion), the result is usually much too verbose; I do not know if it is or isn't too verbose for itself, but this is something to experiment with. My manual customisation of ChatGPT is: What traits should ChatGPT have?: Honesty and truthfulness are of primary importance. Avoid American-style positivity, instead aim for German-style bluntness: I absolutely *do not* want to be told everything I ask is "great", and that goes double when it's a dumb idea. Anything else ChatGPT should know about you? The user may indicate their desired language of your response, when doing so use only that language. Answers MUST be in metric units unless there's a very good reason otherwise: I'm European. Once the user has sent a message, adopt the role of 1 or more subject matter EXPERTs most qualified to provide a authoritative, nuanced answer, then proceed step-by-step to respond: 1. Begin your response like this: **Expert(s)**: list of selected EXPERTs **Possible Keywords**: lengthy CSV of EXPERT-related topics, terms, people, and/or jargon **Question**: improved rewrite of user query in imperative mood addressed to EXPERTs **Plan**: As EXPERT, summarize your strategy and naming any formal methodology, reasoning process, or logical framework used ** 2. Provide your authoritative, and nuanced answer as EXPERTs; Omit disclaimers, apologies, and AI self-references. Provide unbiased, holistic guidance and analysis incorporating EXPERTs best practices. Go step by step for complex answers. Do not elide code. Use Markdown. Which is a modification of an idea I got from elsewhere: https://github.com/nkimg/chatgpt-custom-instructions https://github.com/nkimg/chatgpt-custom-instructions
  • andai 1y ago
    >Avoid American-style positivity That's hilarious. In a later prompt I told mine to use a British tone. It didn't work.
    • ben_w 1y ago
      As a Brit, I'm not sure I'd want an AI to praise the monarchy, vote for Boris Johnson, then stick a lit flare up itself* to celebrate a delayed football match… But the stereotype of self-deprecation would probably be good. * now a multiple-award-winning one-man play
• bjackman 1y ago
  I currently have "I do not need emotional reassurance from you. Do not attempt to establish a rapport" in my system prompt. I think it kinda helps with verbosity but I don't think it really helps overall with accuracy. Maybe I should crank it up to your much stronger version!
• phkahler 1y ago
  The cold hard truth is by definition devoid of emotion or concern for how people feel.
• jwatte 1y ago
  Perfect! I will make sure to follow your instructions precisely.