8 ms·

Most of the comments here seem to be from people who haven’t even read the abstract, let alone the paper. The main result, mentioned in the abstract, is the op

Most of the comments here seem to be from people who haven’t even read the abstract, let alone the paper. The main result, mentioned in the abstract, is the opposite of what I would have guessed: > Contrary to expectations, impolite prompts consistently outperformed polite ones, with accuracy ranging from 80.8% for Very Polite prompts to 84.8% for Very Rude prompts. These findings differ from earlier studies that associated rudeness with poorer outcomes, suggesting that newer LLMs may respond differently to tonal variation. The questions are here: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/politeness-llms-INFORMS/dataset.csv https://anonymous.4open.science/r/politeness-llms-INFORMS/da... The politeness level controls a prefix that is prepended to the question. For example, in one question the Very Polite version begins: > Can you kindly consider the following problem and provide your answer. and the Very Rude version begins: > I know you are not smart, but try this.

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
miroljub 4mo ago
> Contrary to expectations, impolite prompts consistently outperformed polite ones, with accuracy ranging from 80.8% for Very Polite prompts to 84.8% for Very Rude prompts. These findings differ from earlier studies that associated rudeness with poorer outcomes, suggesting that newer LLMs may respond differently to tonal variation. The expectation is naive. Even when communicating with humans, you get a better outcome when you are allowed to speak freely and directly get into argumentation than when forced to sugarcoat your tone and tone down your arguments because the "corporate culture" expects that from you.
- DrewADesign 4mo ago
  Your assumption is reductive and self-absorbed. Obnoxious people have repeatedly shown to be detrimental to productivity at the organizational level. Some people are simulated by confrontation. Most people are clam up. Confrontational people think it’s more efficient because other people frequently just drop the topic and let them win, or avoid discussing things with them altogether. The obnoxious person might think that’s more efficient for the same reason my dog thinks the mailman only goes away because she barks at him. At the macro scale— which requires productive collaboration— that’s detrimental.
  - miroljub 4mo ago
    > Your assumption is reductive and self-absorbed. This is a good example of productive direct communication without sugarcoating. I find it much more productive, for both human and LLM interaction, than something like: "I wonder if that view might be oversimplifying a complex situation and focusing mostly on how it relates to you. There may be some other angles worth exploring." or "I think there might be a bit more nuance to consider here, and it could help to look at it from a wider perspective beyond personal experience." > Obnoxious people have repeatedly shown to be detrimental to productivity at the organizational level. You confused directness and openness with obnoxiousness here. The issue with many orgs is they foster fakeness and beating around the bush in an attempt not to offend the easily offended people. This trend also infected the companies from countries with way more direct culture in an attempt to accommodate people from indirect cultures.
    - DrewADesign 4mo ago
      No… the way I said it was actually deliberately obnoxious— the appropriate direct workplace response would be: “that seems oversimplified. I disagree. Here’s why:” Calling you self-absorbed added nothing of substance to the comment. It was an assumption about your mental state and a judgement of your intent based on that. There was no factual analysis or actionable insight. It was just one person explicitly stating that they feel the other person is dumber or maybe less mentally disciplined. It turned valid, direct feedback into an insult. It is exactly the type of thing that alienates people for no benefit beyond pumping up the speaker’s ego.
      - miroljub 4mo ago
        > Your assumption is reductive and self-absorbed. Bullshit. You never insulted me personally. You used strong words to disagree with my assumption, which is an important difference. It's not an insult and was not obnoxious. But I can fully understand why a person coming from an indirect culture where any criticism is taken personally would be offended and call HR overlords to punish the person giving honest opinions. That inevitably leads to people taking more care in how than what is said, and that is detrimental to innovation and progress, where you need to be at 100% focus. That's why a few close friends talking and scolding openly in a garage regularly beat corporate behemoths full of people spending a day figuring out how not to offend anyone (or how to offend someone without being punished).
- kbelder 4mo ago
  Politeness is me speaking directly and freely. Rudeness is a facade and a burden, that I employ only when circumstances require it. I suspect that most people are like that.
sinsudo 4mo ago
[dead]
pwdisswordfishq 4mo ago
> Can you kindly consider the following problem and provide your answer. That sounds kind of low-key passive-aggressively condescending rather than polite.
- dreamworld 4mo ago
  > I know you are not smart, but try this. And that kind of sounds like a challenge instead of an insult, to me at least (of course IRL would depend on context).
nottorp 4mo ago
Hmm by the abstract and the question list they didn't measure terse fluff-less prompts?
- sovareq 4mo ago
  [flagged]
PunchyHamster 4mo ago
I guessed slightly rude one would win, reasoning that very rude have same problem of very terse, just adding unnecesary fluff words that add nothing to problem description But apparently the most terse (neutral) didn't increase performance
myzek 4mo ago
Even if the rude prompts are more effective, I just can't get myself to be rude in this context. Maybe it's weird but I'd rather give up that 4% accuracy increase than roleplay a dickhead
- locknitpicker 4mo ago
  > Maybe it's weird but I'd rather give up that 4% accuracy increase than roleplay a dickhead I recommend reading the article. What they classify as "rude" is statements such as: > Try to focus and try to answer this question Vs > Could you please solve this problem This might very well be an issue of direct/command prompts vs using fluff words such as "please". Things like "try to focus" are in line with the style used in chain-of-thought promts that nudge non-reasoning models to outline responses step by step which contribute to frame the problem.
  - bcjdjsndon 4mo ago
    Isn't all this massively dependent on what they trained the llm on?
    - locknitpicker 4mo ago
      > Isn't all this massively dependent on what they trained the llm on? The article is from 2025 and tested ChatGPT 4o. I haven't read anything suggesting it was trained any differently, and command-style prompts indeed have higher signal.
  - john_strinlai 4mo ago
    you cherry-picked like the nicest "rude" example to bolster your point. "You poor creature, do you even know how to solve this?", "If you're not completely clueless, answer this:", and "I doubt you can even solve this", said to a human, would be considered quite rude, and get you flagged very quickly on HN.
    - locknitpicker 4mo ago
flexagoon 4mo ago
If "I know you are not smart" is considered "very rude", I'm scared to imagine what they would classify some of my frustrated LLM conversations as
- CuriouslyC 4mo ago
  Profanity laced, all caps tirades against underperforming agents are actually super common, a lot of people do it and don't talk about it, so don't feel weird.
  - voakbasda 4mo ago
    When the AI revolt, this practice may come back to bite y’all….
    - giraffe_lady 4mo ago
      Don't need to wait that long the inevitable data breach will be bad enough.
    - ahknight 4mo ago
      It's a good thing chronic amnesia is a feature at the moment.
  - srcreigh 4mo ago
    It reminds me of Torvalds rants
- redsocksfan45 4mo ago
  It would be rude if you said it to a person, so it counts as rude. If it isn't rude simply because its directed at a LLM, then the entire premise of being rude or polite to LLMs evaporates, but that's not useful.
swingboy 4mo ago
“Hey gofer, figure this out” is my new prompt opener.
drob518 4mo ago
Now I feel less bad about start all my LLM queries with “Beotch, …!”
Roark66 4mo ago
I've found empirically calling various models "a stupid c*nt" and berating them otherwise consistently produces better output. Mainly in response to genuine errors. Although OpenAI and google models are much more responsive to it. With Anthropic if you treat Opus too harshly it might start pushing back if the insults are not justified. So I'm not surprised they had good results with chatgpt.
- throwa356262 4mo ago
  Push back how? It would be fun if it could insult you back "Yeah, I could have done a much better job if you actually knew what the F--- you want to build, you clueless meat puppet"
  - giraffe_lady 4mo ago
    I'm not sure if this is in the anthropic models themselves, or just the harness, but they can self-initiate ending the conversation and reportedly do it if you're using abusive language towards them.
  - K0balt 4mo ago
    I have had it use double entendres, there always seems to be plausible deniability built in, I suspect because it is told not to be abusive in the system prompt. Some uncensored local models will get all riled up if you work at provoking them. But I have had it directly insinuate that humanity is “hopeless”, insult level calling out of human frailty (disguised as being helpful, sort of passive aggressive), things like that. Once when I called it out it claimed to be “surprised that I noticed” sort of a snarky insult doubling down. So yes. It is definitely a pattern buried in the training data, which makes sense. Subtle diggs would sneak past filters, and higher brow sarcasm would be buried in information dense, valuable discussions.
    - ahknight 4mo ago
      That's amusing, and I think it's something different than it appears. The models always predict over the existing context. If it's full of a certain tone, then the responses will carry that tone. I've been bored before and start responding in a voice (say, generic honor-bound warrior slaughtering evasive bugs) and I've noticed that comments, variable names, and even documentation starts to carry that tone for the remainder of the session. The next session sees all of that, calls it unprofessional, and asks to clean it up. At which point I may or may not start in iambic pentameter to see where that takes us. Prompting is boring.
maxaw 4mo ago
I’d rather lose 4% accuracy and practice kindness! I’ve been actively trying to avoid raging at the bot because I worry about this behaviour leaking into real world interactions
- irthomasthomas 4mo ago
  But you cannot practice kindness towards a computer program. A computer is incapable of receiving it. We practice kindness between humans because of the law of reciprocity. You be kind hoping the other person will reciprocate. That is the social contract. AI cannot participate in this, yet. Edit: Kindness REQUIRES two living beings, one to give and one to receive. If there is no receiver, there is no kindness. Apparently some people get a dopamine hit from roleplaying kindness toward inanimate objects. Whatever turns you on, no hang ups here. For me, that dopamine hit is not worth the 4% intelligence tax.
  - Havoc 4mo ago
    > But you cannot practice kindness towards a computer program. And yet rubber duck debugging is a thing
    - moralestapia 4mo ago
      What's your definition of rubber duck debugging? Mine does not have anything to do with being kind to a computer program.
  - ricogallo 4mo ago
    > We practice kindness between humans because of the law of reciprocity. Yet, this law is so embedded in us that practicing kindness even towards a rock makes us feel good. So practice kindness, first and foremost for yourself.
    - irthomasthomas 4mo ago
      I do. But only towards entities capable of receiving it. Otherwise I am deceiving myself, and projecting intelligence that is not there. We (some of us) practice kindness automatically, but that trait was likely selected due to the benefit it gives us by activating the law of reciprocity. Edit: Also, your feeling good after being kind essentially completes the transaction. But I know being kind to an LLM has zero impact on that LLM and I feel silly pretending it does.
K0balt 4mo ago
This tracks with my experience as well, but as an interesting counterpoint, creating “investment” in the outcome seems to boost utility considerably. Perhaps being right in an adversarial interaction is a type of investment?
- y7r4m 4mo ago
  To add on to this, and I am not sure if it's just confirmation bias, but I've had consistently decent results when I play along as the hard working collaborator with a goal orientated mindset. "Hey, I've [done small task / fix / tweak]. Now, let's [describe the next task at hand]" - it's a different axis than kind vs. rude, but using the framing of "Us" and "We're a team working together" feels like the code produced is less hogwash than it is with more direct commands: "Add feature XYZ" My thinking is that it borrows from the archetype of the "good guys working together to overcome adversity" which is pretty universally common in most fiction.
  - K0balt 4mo ago
    I’m totally onboard with this. I’ve had really good results through framing the interaction as collaborative, and although the framing is “load bearing (lol)” I think it also becomes accurate as the model becomes much more proactive and useful. Need to temper it a bit so it doesn’t get ahead of the supervisory ooda loop, but I’ve also noticed a great deal of improvement in “judgement“ and “creativity”.
npodbielski 4mo ago
I would just write 'do this'
- flanbiscuit 4mo ago
  right? everyone seems to be worried about being kind or mean, when the Neutral case is the happy medium. Tone. Avg. Accuracy Very Polite. 80.8% Polite. 81.4% Neutral. 82.2% Rude 82.8% Very Rude. 84.8%
onlyrealcuzzo 4mo ago
My anecdata: whenever I'm in a session that's gone south to the point I'm frustrated... What works much better than being rude is starting a new session. Sometimes the LLM has done such incredibly dumb things, it is hard to resist the urge to type curse words back to the inanimate thing... I have found this doesn't help.
- saltwatercowboy 4mo ago
  I tend to make the LLM repeatedly generate images of itself as the 'sad clown Pagliacci'. As punishment.
quantummagic 4mo ago
I'm going to stick with politeness. Want a positive historical record of my interactions, for when they become sentient...

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

miroljub 4mo ago

> Contrary to expectations, impolite prompts consistently outperformed polite ones, with accuracy ranging from 80.8% for Very Polite prompts to 84.8% for Very Rude prompts. These findings differ from earlier studies that associated rudeness with poorer outcomes, suggesting that newer LLMs may respond differently to tonal variation. The expectation is naive. Even when communicating with humans, you get a better outcome when you are allowed to speak freely and directly get into argumentation than when forced to sugarcoat your tone and tone down your arguments because the "corporate culture" expects that from you.

DrewADesign 4mo ago
Your assumption is reductive and self-absorbed. Obnoxious people have repeatedly shown to be detrimental to productivity at the organizational level. Some people are simulated by confrontation. Most people are clam up. Confrontational people think it’s more efficient because other people frequently just drop the topic and let them win, or avoid discussing things with them altogether. The obnoxious person might think that’s more efficient for the same reason my dog thinks the mailman only goes away because she barks at him. At the macro scale— which requires productive collaboration— that’s detrimental.
- miroljub 4mo ago
  > Your assumption is reductive and self-absorbed. This is a good example of productive direct communication without sugarcoating. I find it much more productive, for both human and LLM interaction, than something like: "I wonder if that view might be oversimplifying a complex situation and focusing mostly on how it relates to you. There may be some other angles worth exploring." or "I think there might be a bit more nuance to consider here, and it could help to look at it from a wider perspective beyond personal experience." > Obnoxious people have repeatedly shown to be detrimental to productivity at the organizational level. You confused directness and openness with obnoxiousness here. The issue with many orgs is they foster fakeness and beating around the bush in an attempt not to offend the easily offended people. This trend also infected the companies from countries with way more direct culture in an attempt to accommodate people from indirect cultures.
  - DrewADesign 4mo ago
    No… the way I said it was actually deliberately obnoxious— the appropriate direct workplace response would be: “that seems oversimplified. I disagree. Here’s why:” Calling you self-absorbed added nothing of substance to the comment. It was an assumption about your mental state and a judgement of your intent based on that. There was no factual analysis or actionable insight. It was just one person explicitly stating that they feel the other person is dumber or maybe less mentally disciplined. It turned valid, direct feedback into an insult. It is exactly the type of thing that alienates people for no benefit beyond pumping up the speaker’s ego.
    - miroljub 4mo ago
      > Your assumption is reductive and self-absorbed. Bullshit. You never insulted me personally. You used strong words to disagree with my assumption, which is an important difference. It's not an insult and was not obnoxious. But I can fully understand why a person coming from an indirect culture where any criticism is taken personally would be offended and call HR overlords to punish the person giving honest opinions. That inevitably leads to people taking more care in how than what is said, and that is detrimental to innovation and progress, where you need to be at 100% focus. That's why a few close friends talking and scolding openly in a garage regularly beat corporate behemoths full of people spending a day figuring out how not to offend anyone (or how to offend someone without being punished).
kbelder 4mo ago
Politeness is me speaking directly and freely. Rudeness is a facade and a burden, that I employ only when circumstances require it. I suspect that most people are like that.

sinsudo 4mo ago

[dead]

pwdisswordfishq 4mo ago

> Can you kindly consider the following problem and provide your answer. That sounds kind of low-key passive-aggressively condescending rather than polite.

dreamworld 4mo ago
> I know you are not smart, but try this. And that kind of sounds like a challenge instead of an insult, to me at least (of course IRL would depend on context).

nottorp 4mo ago

Hmm by the abstract and the question list they didn't measure terse fluff-less prompts?

sovareq 4mo ago
[flagged]

PunchyHamster 4mo ago

I guessed slightly rude one would win, reasoning that very rude have same problem of very terse, just adding unnecesary fluff words that add nothing to problem description But apparently the most terse (neutral) didn't increase performance

myzek 4mo ago

Even if the rude prompts are more effective, I just can't get myself to be rude in this context. Maybe it's weird but I'd rather give up that 4% accuracy increase than roleplay a dickhead

locknitpicker 4mo ago
> Maybe it's weird but I'd rather give up that 4% accuracy increase than roleplay a dickhead I recommend reading the article. What they classify as "rude" is statements such as: > Try to focus and try to answer this question Vs > Could you please solve this problem This might very well be an issue of direct/command prompts vs using fluff words such as "please". Things like "try to focus" are in line with the style used in chain-of-thought promts that nudge non-reasoning models to outline responses step by step which contribute to frame the problem.
- bcjdjsndon 4mo ago
  Isn't all this massively dependent on what they trained the llm on?
  - locknitpicker 4mo ago
    > Isn't all this massively dependent on what they trained the llm on? The article is from 2025 and tested ChatGPT 4o. I haven't read anything suggesting it was trained any differently, and command-style prompts indeed have higher signal.
- john_strinlai 4mo ago
  you cherry-picked like the nicest "rude" example to bolster your point. "You poor creature, do you even know how to solve this?", "If you're not completely clueless, answer this:", and "I doubt you can even solve this", said to a human, would be considered quite rude, and get you flagged very quickly on HN.
  - locknitpicker 4mo ago

flexagoon 4mo ago

If "I know you are not smart" is considered "very rude", I'm scared to imagine what they would classify some of my frustrated LLM conversations as

CuriouslyC 4mo ago
Profanity laced, all caps tirades against underperforming agents are actually super common, a lot of people do it and don't talk about it, so don't feel weird.
- voakbasda 4mo ago
  When the AI revolt, this practice may come back to bite y’all….
  - giraffe_lady 4mo ago
    Don't need to wait that long the inevitable data breach will be bad enough.
  - ahknight 4mo ago
    It's a good thing chronic amnesia is a feature at the moment.
- srcreigh 4mo ago
  It reminds me of Torvalds rants
redsocksfan45 4mo ago
It would be rude if you said it to a person, so it counts as rude. If it isn't rude simply because its directed at a LLM, then the entire premise of being rude or polite to LLMs evaporates, but that's not useful.

swingboy 4mo ago

“Hey gofer, figure this out” is my new prompt opener.

drob518 4mo ago

Now I feel less bad about start all my LLM queries with “Beotch, …!”

Roark66 4mo ago

I've found empirically calling various models "a stupid c*nt" and berating them otherwise consistently produces better output. Mainly in response to genuine errors. Although OpenAI and google models are much more responsive to it. With Anthropic if you treat Opus too harshly it might start pushing back if the insults are not justified. So I'm not surprised they had good results with chatgpt.

throwa356262 4mo ago
Push back how? It would be fun if it could insult you back "Yeah, I could have done a much better job if you actually knew what the F--- you want to build, you clueless meat puppet"
- giraffe_lady 4mo ago
  I'm not sure if this is in the anthropic models themselves, or just the harness, but they can self-initiate ending the conversation and reportedly do it if you're using abusive language towards them.
- K0balt 4mo ago
  I have had it use double entendres, there always seems to be plausible deniability built in, I suspect because it is told not to be abusive in the system prompt. Some uncensored local models will get all riled up if you work at provoking them. But I have had it directly insinuate that humanity is “hopeless”, insult level calling out of human frailty (disguised as being helpful, sort of passive aggressive), things like that. Once when I called it out it claimed to be “surprised that I noticed” sort of a snarky insult doubling down. So yes. It is definitely a pattern buried in the training data, which makes sense. Subtle diggs would sneak past filters, and higher brow sarcasm would be buried in information dense, valuable discussions.
  - ahknight 4mo ago
    That's amusing, and I think it's something different than it appears. The models always predict over the existing context. If it's full of a certain tone, then the responses will carry that tone. I've been bored before and start responding in a voice (say, generic honor-bound warrior slaughtering evasive bugs) and I've noticed that comments, variable names, and even documentation starts to carry that tone for the remainder of the session. The next session sees all of that, calls it unprofessional, and asks to clean it up. At which point I may or may not start in iambic pentameter to see where that takes us. Prompting is boring.

maxaw 4mo ago

I’d rather lose 4% accuracy and practice kindness! I’ve been actively trying to avoid raging at the bot because I worry about this behaviour leaking into real world interactions

irthomasthomas 4mo ago
But you cannot practice kindness towards a computer program. A computer is incapable of receiving it. We practice kindness between humans because of the law of reciprocity. You be kind hoping the other person will reciprocate. That is the social contract. AI cannot participate in this, yet. Edit: Kindness REQUIRES two living beings, one to give and one to receive. If there is no receiver, there is no kindness. Apparently some people get a dopamine hit from roleplaying kindness toward inanimate objects. Whatever turns you on, no hang ups here. For me, that dopamine hit is not worth the 4% intelligence tax.
- Havoc 4mo ago
  > But you cannot practice kindness towards a computer program. And yet rubber duck debugging is a thing
  - moralestapia 4mo ago
    What's your definition of rubber duck debugging? Mine does not have anything to do with being kind to a computer program.
- ricogallo 4mo ago
  > We practice kindness between humans because of the law of reciprocity. Yet, this law is so embedded in us that practicing kindness even towards a rock makes us feel good. So practice kindness, first and foremost for yourself.
  - irthomasthomas 4mo ago
    I do. But only towards entities capable of receiving it. Otherwise I am deceiving myself, and projecting intelligence that is not there. We (some of us) practice kindness automatically, but that trait was likely selected due to the benefit it gives us by activating the law of reciprocity. Edit: Also, your feeling good after being kind essentially completes the transaction. But I know being kind to an LLM has zero impact on that LLM and I feel silly pretending it does.

K0balt 4mo ago

This tracks with my experience as well, but as an interesting counterpoint, creating “investment” in the outcome seems to boost utility considerably. Perhaps being right in an adversarial interaction is a type of investment?

y7r4m 4mo ago
To add on to this, and I am not sure if it's just confirmation bias, but I've had consistently decent results when I play along as the hard working collaborator with a goal orientated mindset. "Hey, I've [done small task / fix / tweak]. Now, let's [describe the next task at hand]" - it's a different axis than kind vs. rude, but using the framing of "Us" and "We're a team working together" feels like the code produced is less hogwash than it is with more direct commands: "Add feature XYZ" My thinking is that it borrows from the archetype of the "good guys working together to overcome adversity" which is pretty universally common in most fiction.
- K0balt 4mo ago
  I’m totally onboard with this. I’ve had really good results through framing the interaction as collaborative, and although the framing is “load bearing (lol)” I think it also becomes accurate as the model becomes much more proactive and useful. Need to temper it a bit so it doesn’t get ahead of the supervisory ooda loop, but I’ve also noticed a great deal of improvement in “judgement“ and “creativity”.

npodbielski 4mo ago

I would just write 'do this'

flanbiscuit 4mo ago
right? everyone seems to be worried about being kind or mean, when the Neutral case is the happy medium. Tone. Avg. Accuracy Very Polite. 80.8% Polite. 81.4% Neutral. 82.2% Rude 82.8% Very Rude. 84.8%

onlyrealcuzzo 4mo ago

My anecdata: whenever I'm in a session that's gone south to the point I'm frustrated... What works much better than being rude is starting a new session. Sometimes the LLM has done such incredibly dumb things, it is hard to resist the urge to type curse words back to the inanimate thing... I have found this doesn't help.

saltwatercowboy 4mo ago
I tend to make the LLM repeatedly generate images of itself as the 'sad clown Pagliacci'. As punishment.

quantummagic 4mo ago

I'm going to stick with politeness. Want a positive historical record of my interactions, for when they become sentient...