More Stupid LLM Tricks

It is hilariously difficult to get out of the box ChatGPT 3.5 to even just get the list of states and first two letters correct. Took me five or six goes, and I finally succeeded with:

   Create a list of (fullname, f2) values, with one row per state.
   Fullname = the full name of the state. f2 = the first two letters of the state name.
   For example:
   (Alaska, Al)
   (Alabama, Al)
   (New York, Ne)

   Note that these are NOT the two letter state abbreviations.
   That would be AK for Alaska. Do NOT put AK for Alaska.
   The only time a two letter state abbreviation is correct for f2 is when,
   as with Alaska, the first two letters happen to be the same as the two
   letter state abbreviation. 

   Check the list and verify that f2 is the first two letters of the state
   name. Do not make f2 the two letter state abbreviation unless that happens
   to be the first two letters of the state name.

I had to add that last para because previous attempts yielded "(Louisiana, La)" in the middle of an otherwise correct list.

(I started a new chat each time and hope that's enough that I haven't simply been training hidden state and the above query is simply the last one before it produced the right output. I do wonder whether your mileage will vary using the same prompt.)

Another prompt i have seen that fools some LLMs but not others is "How many legs does a Manx cat have?" Some will answer with the expected four, but some get confused and will tell you that it has no legs (the Manx cat is known for having no tail, but has the standard four legs). I wish I documented it at the time but one LLM even returned the answer that a Manx cat has no legs, and then quoted a long paragraph from somewhere (possibly wikipedia) as a reference that clearly stated it has four legs but no tail.