Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

I have the same issue.

I often get annoyed with ChatGPT yammering on and on, so I repeatedly told it to cut to the chase and speak more succinctly.

Now it just says "I'll get right to the point..." and then still yammers on and on unabated.

View on HN

LLMs are like children; telling them to not do something puts the idea in their 'head'.

Instead, telling them to do the opposite works. "Brevity is appreaciated", or "Preserve Tokens and be concise."

It’s called the waluigi problem and is also part of the reason why you can never fully “censor” an LLM; there is always some jailbreak possible

This happened to me too. I eliminated it in text responses, but eventually figured out that there's a system prompt in voice mode that says to do this (more or less) regardless of any instructions you give to the contrary. Attempting to override it will just make it increasingly awkward and obvious.

I went from using voice mode near-exclusively for brainstorming and planning out projects to giving up on voice altogether because of this very thing.

Might not be the best fix but other than disabling memory I changed the setting ‘ChatGPT personality’ to ‘Robot’ and I’ve always had straight to the point answers (so far).

Yeah, ChatGPT is a tool not a therapist with robot mode on and all memory options disabled. It’s awesome.

I add "Terse, no commentary" to a request, which it will obey, but then immediately return to yammering in a follow-up message. However, this is in Incognito; maybe there's a setting when logged in.

You can add a custom instruction in settings. That works pretty well, applies to all chats. Memory feature I of course disabled as soon as it was released so I don't know which takes precedence.

With GPT5 there is a persona (I think, I forget what the call it) setting, I chose "Robot" and that shut it up pretty well.

Same. The GPT5 “Robot” persona does what no custom “be terse”, “no fluff”, etc. custom prompt ever could. It actually makes ChatGPT terse and to-the-point and eliminates (or at least greatly reduces) fluff. I love it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com