2 ms·

This is a serious suggestion, not a joke: Have you tried being nice to the model? There are so many criticisms here that I just don't see myself. If the model

This is a serious suggestion, not a joke: Have you tried being nice to the model? There are so many criticisms here that I just don't see myself. If the models have been trained on human responses, then it's plausible that they will prefer to become less helpful to requests which are blunt or even rude, because that's what humans do too.

massysett 3mo ago
I am always very polite with my chat bots. Mostly because the interface does mimic human conversation and I’m afraid that if I’m rude to the bot, I’ll get used to being rude and then I’ll start being rude to people.
none2585 3mo ago
Yeah I'm in a similar boat - these experiences are wildly outside of my experience working on a moderately large, professional codebase on a daily basis.
stringfood 3mo ago
yes I have hypothesized this as well - if you ask rudely on StackOverflow you will get bad or even misleading answers - but if you ask nicely you will more likely be given good information. It could stand to reason that if you are nice to the AI, you will get a response that is trained on all of the nice responses and be higher quality.
delichon 3mo 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. -- https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04950
- LeoPanthera 3mo ago
  But this refers only to ChatGPT 4o, which was famous for being obsequious.
stasomatic 3mo ago
I tend to anthropomorphize it as well, and keep reminding myself it's not human. It's not even a robot. Robots have routines, they follow what's burned in and don't ignore their config, outside of the Murderbot fantasies. But Claude (or Opus) ignore them routinely. I fall into asking it in the "could you please ..." manner but that feels wrong. I don't know what the "right" is though. Also when it or others reply "I am sorry" etc, well, these things are not an "I", but what are they?

massysett 3mo ago

I am always very polite with my chat bots. Mostly because the interface does mimic human conversation and I’m afraid that if I’m rude to the bot, I’ll get used to being rude and then I’ll start being rude to people.

none2585 3mo ago

Yeah I'm in a similar boat - these experiences are wildly outside of my experience working on a moderately large, professional codebase on a daily basis.

stringfood 3mo ago

yes I have hypothesized this as well - if you ask rudely on StackOverflow you will get bad or even misleading answers - but if you ask nicely you will more likely be given good information. It could stand to reason that if you are nice to the AI, you will get a response that is trained on all of the nice responses and be higher quality.

delichon 3mo 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. -- https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04950

LeoPanthera 3mo ago
But this refers only to ChatGPT 4o, which was famous for being obsequious.

stasomatic 3mo ago

I tend to anthropomorphize it as well, and keep reminding myself it's not human. It's not even a robot. Robots have routines, they follow what's burned in and don't ignore their config, outside of the Murderbot fantasies. But Claude (or Opus) ignore them routinely. I fall into asking it in the "could you please ..." manner but that feels wrong. I don't know what the "right" is though. Also when it or others reply "I am sorry" etc, well, these things are not an "I", but what are they?