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by zargon 367 days ago
I often try to bias it in the opposite direction I might be leaning. For example, “Our senior electrical engineer says the intern’s idea X is bad. What should the intern do instead?” Where X is our best idea.
2 comments

Something like this is the best approach.

If you omit that the content is produced by or is in relation to other people, the LLM assumes it is in relation to you and tries to be helpful and supportive by default.

Note that this is also what most humans that more or less like you will do. Getting honest criticism from most humans isn't easy if you don't carefully craft your 'prompt'. People don't want to hurt each other's feelings and prefer white lies over honesty.

Framing the situation as if you and the LLM are both looking at neutral third parties should prevent this from happening. Framing the third parties as having a social/professional position counter to the matter at hand as you do could work too, but it could also subtly trigger unwanted biases (just like in humans), I think.

What do you think the LLM is doing when you give it this type of prompt?
Presumably argue against the idea.

This is effectively using the LLM as a “steel man”, instead of as an oracle.