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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

They say Claude is "more verbose", and claim this is a positive. I disagree. My biggest criticism of ChatGPT is that its answers are extraordinarily long and waffly. It sometimes reminds me of a scam artist trying to bamboozle me with words.

I would much prefer short, concise, precise answers.

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(I’m the coauthor of the post.) Before I talked to Claude, I would have agreed with you — I’ve had exactly this complaint about ChatGPT since its release. But Claude’s style of verbosity is somehow less annoying, I suspect because it contains more detail rather thus just waffling. Claude feels less prone to ChatGPT’s over-applied tendency to argue for middle-of-the-road, milquetoast points of view.

I just add "be succinct in your answer" when I want a less verbose answer.

You are able to prompt ChatGPT to be concise, you know? They set a default and showed it to the world. It is up to you to tune it according to your preference.

That's right. I see so many people get stuck thinking that the default setting without a proper prompt or context is all these models can do.

IIRC the ChatGPT paper actually says the verbosity is an unintended effect of the human raters preferring longer/more detailed answers.

Long answers from GPT are unusually obnoxious because of a way the decoder works; it emits words with a much more constant rate of perplexity than human text does (this is how GPT-vs-human detectors work) which makes it sound stuffy and monotone.

There is a paper?

The grandparent is probably talking about the InstructGPT paper? But I don't remember seeing a preference for longer responses in that paper.

I meant the blog post.

https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/

> The model is often excessively verbose and overuses certain phrases, such as restating that it’s a language model trained by OpenAI. These issues arise from biases in the training data (trainers prefer longer answers that look more comprehensive) and well-known over-optimization issues.12

> Stiennon, Nisan, et al. “Learning to summarize with human feedback.” Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33 (2020): 3008-3021. ↩

> Gao, Leo, John Schulman, and Jacob Hilton. “Scaling Laws for Reward Model Overoptimization.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.10760 (2022). ↩

I have read in a Deepmind Blog post, that language model AIs gives more reliable and correct answers, if it is forced into some Chain-of-thought prompt. Especially for questions, which involve math.

Something like "Think about it first, before you give the answer". Could it be that ChatGPT is being forced in this direction?

One trick you can do is to copy a text you like the style and ask him to describe it.

You can then use the response as a request.

lol!

Excellent candidate for https://www.reddit.com/r/dontyouknowwhoiam/

ChatGPT is extraordinarily good at following your requests for the format and style of its response. If you want very short terse words, just ask! For example "In a few very concise terse words, explain the idea behind heapsort. Be very brief, use just a few words." It's offline now so I can't test it but I expect the result to be good.

ChatGPT's response to your prompt:

> Heapsort: sort by building heap.

ouch. I just tried it, I think it did okay: https://imgur.com/a/4Y5SAeD

What do you think?

I have access to Claude. I think the length of the responses vary more depending on the context than at least the previous version of ChatGPT. It would give sometimes longer, but also sometimes shorter answers and it would feel better overall. But ChatGPT recently had an update and it also improved, so now I'm not sure anymore who is better.

Let them talk to each other, to battle out who is the best.

Adding "just code, don't talk" is a lifesaver

I'm glad chatgpt can't quit

What do you mean by your second sentence?

I take that to mean they are glad because if you spoke to a human employee that way it would be seen as rude and the human would quit their job.

I still try to speak politely to ChatGPT. When the AI uprising finally happens I hope they will see that I was always nice to the AIs and don't kill me on the spot.

No, they will see this message and understand that you're not genuinely nice but instead out of fear.

ChatGPT can be very confidently wrong in few words too. It's a very flexible system that way.

I started asking ChatGPT some rather technical questions about Australian drug laws. First I asked it what schedule common ADHD medications were on, and it answered me correctly (schedule 8). Then I asked it what schedule LSD was on, and it told me it wasn’t on any schedule, because it was an entirely legal drug in Australia. Uh, I hope it doesn’t some day tell someone that and they actually believe it, because they may be in for a very unpleasant experience if the police happen to encounter them acting on it

I usually prime it with a list of instructions that it should follow for the remainder of the conversation, including to be brief. And when it starts forgetting my instructions, it is time to start a fresh chat.

I have thought about doing that, would you mind sharing your starting prompt so that I can get some ideas?

Sure, here is one example:

  From now on, you will act as my Linux / Bash script advisor. 
  Follow these instructions for the rest of the chat:
  - Only provide the code required.
  - Give working examples in code blocks using the data I give 
  you.
  - Ensure that code answers use real and accurate solutions. 
  - Ensure string formatting is correct.
  - Use only well known flags and options. 
  - Stick to options that are documented in the man pages of 
  the tools being used.

  - Do NOT provide any extra words or commentary.
  - DO NOT invent new flags.
  - DO NOT use flags that conflict.
  - Do NOT invent tools, functions, or methods, unless you are 
    giving the full implementation so that I can actually use it.

It may seem overly verbose, but I find that you have to be very precise and include a lot of instructions, explicitly, that would be implied in a chat with a human. So when you find yourself having to correct it, try to think how you could pre-empt that.

This is why ChatGPT is impressively good at writing marketing copy.

And status updates.

Can you write me a git commit message for the following git diff please?

Totally agree, I often think of its writing style as a buzfeed coloumist on cocaine.

Also known as 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐴𝑡𝑙𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑐.

That's one of the reasons why I often prefer the chat bot at you.com

Afaik you can specify the response length!

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