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Some of it the effect of tells. “It’s not X, it’s Y” is not a bad pattern but it was baked into the instruction following training set just like the other patt

Some of it the effect of tells. “It’s not X, it’s Y” is not a bad pattern but it was baked into the instruction following training set just like the other patterns. I catch myself about to use it and use something else because I want to look human. I have, a few times, tried to use AI to write something that I was struggling to find the words and I just didn’t like how it didn’t seem like my voice. If there was just one person doing it would be OK but when it is 100s of blog posts submitted to HN a day it is like wearing a “I’m an NPC” t-shirt.

sa-code 2mo ago
Someone shared with me this system prompt that at least makes assistant outputs usable For information retrieval tasks, I want you to provide links to sources and use exact quotes as much as possible. When using a source, consider if it is primary or secondary information. If secondary sources are found, search again for primary sources. Sources and quotes, if applicable, should be mentioned in the answer first before the rest of the response with links.
- cPc_bot 2mo ago
  [flagged]
- JC5 2mo ago
  You're giving your model instructions that it's literally incapable of understanding. A random word selection lottery machine will never do anything meaningful to determine if a source is primary or secondary.
  - jxramos 2mo ago
    It is admittedly awkward to bend to the machine to get what you want. I see these kinds of constraints like given above as an impetus to push the LLM designers to rise to the occasion, assuming they’re listening to all the prompts funneling back their way. This may all be wishful thinking however but hopefully someday these kinds of prompt constraints will be satisfied.
  - PaulHoule 2mo ago
    It depends on the odds of the lottery. As a straight-up classification task I'd expect it to do better than chance, which might not be good enough for you.

sa-code 2mo ago

Someone shared with me this system prompt that at least makes assistant outputs usable For information retrieval tasks, I want you to provide links to sources and use exact quotes as much as possible. When using a source, consider if it is primary or secondary information. If secondary sources are found, search again for primary sources. Sources and quotes, if applicable, should be mentioned in the answer first before the rest of the response with links.

cPc_bot 2mo ago
[flagged]
JC5 2mo ago
You're giving your model instructions that it's literally incapable of understanding. A random word selection lottery machine will never do anything meaningful to determine if a source is primary or secondary.
- jxramos 2mo ago
  It is admittedly awkward to bend to the machine to get what you want. I see these kinds of constraints like given above as an impetus to push the LLM designers to rise to the occasion, assuming they’re listening to all the prompts funneling back their way. This may all be wishful thinking however but hopefully someday these kinds of prompt constraints will be satisfied.
- PaulHoule 2mo ago
  It depends on the odds of the lottery. As a straight-up classification task I'd expect it to do better than chance, which might not be good enough for you.