Quick, don't think of an elephant in a pink tutu! You did, didn't you? As a scientist, you should know that LLMs are pretty bad at understanding negatives beca

Quick, don't think of an elephant in a pink tutu! You did, didn't you? As a scientist, you should know that LLMs are pretty bad at understanding negatives because they work on tokens, not words. "NO ELEPHANTS" roughly becomes NO + ELEPHANT. Now "elephant" is in the context and it's going to be "thinking" about it and steering everything towards it. You need to use positive instructions.