[Foskya]

> They talk like real people. They use a relaxed and friendly tone. They often praise you, and when they “push back” they’re gentle and attentive.

> Maybe I would prefer a more radical solution: drop the human pretense entirely. Make the agent sound clinical, robotic.

Honestly this problem is easy to solve when you gave them the right instructions. It stops being a "relationship" and stars being a tool (for some examples see the smart caveman (my favorite) or just something simple like "Responses should be factual and direct, avoid emotional overtones" or "Avoid flattery of any kind")

[astrange]

Do you actually have evidence this works and doesn't degrade performance?

[Foskya]

I've seen a few studies about it. If i remeber correctly, basically making them talk like a caveman increases the information density of every token and decreases the chance that they would allucinate.

As sources this is the one i found but i'm sure there are others: > Persona-based Prompting Has An Effect on Theory-of-Mind Reasoning in Large Language Models > Text Compression as a Proxy for LLM Reasoning Efficiency