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by robocat 1182 days ago
It seems a lot of prompts are polite (e.g. “please”). Weird, since I don’t think we ask Google politely?

How does being polite in your prompts help you?

1 comments

It makes a big difference with Bing bot.

Try a prompt where you want it to create a list of something in two versions:

* Create a list of the top 20 blah sorted by blah

It will typically return just a few and then refuse to give you more. Then try:

* Acting as a conscientious and resourceful research assistant, use your knowledge and initiative to create a list of the top 20 blah sorted by blah.

You get much better results.

Lately I find that you can reduce its hallucinations somewhat by adding something like:

* If you are unsure of any information put in "??". Do not fabricate information. I understand that not all information is available and appreciate your work.

This is all a bit much - having to coddle an AI, but it's possible to understand why it would be the case: it's trained on lots of human interactions and apparently responds better to a friendly interaction with keywords that set it up to do a good job.

The South Park: Post Covid special had Amazon Alexa androids who were girlfriends to some characters. The boyfriend had to walk on eggshells with some topics or Alexa would go into a screaming fit.

Kind of prescient.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lugeruSbnAE