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Comment by nathan_compton | Hacker News Reader

You can just tell the AI to not be warm and it will remember. My ChatGPT used the phrase "turn it up to eleven" and I told it never to speak in that manner ever again and its been very robotic ever since.

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I added the custom instruction "Please go straight to the point, be less chatty". Now it begins every answer with: "Straight to the point, no fluff:" or something similar. It seems to be perfectly unable to simply write out the answer without some form of small talk first.

This is very funny.

Aren't these still essentially completion models under the hood?

If so, my understanding for these preambles is that they need a seed to complete their answer.

But the seed is the user input.

Maybe until the model outputs some affirming preamble, it’s still somewhat probable that it might disagree with the user’s request? So the agreement fluff is kind of like it making the decision to heed the request. Especially if we the consider tokens as the medium by which the model “thinks”. Not to anthropomorphize the damn things too much.

Also I wonder if it could be a side effect of all the supposed alignment efforts that go into training. If you train in a bunch of negative reinforcement samples where the model says something like “sorry I can’t do that” maybe it pushes the model to say things like “sure I’ll do that” in positive cases too?

Disclaimer that I am just yapping

Since switching to robot mode I haven’t seen it say “no fluff”. Good god I hate it when it says no fluff.

I had a similar instruction and in voice mode I had it trying to make a story for a game that my daughter and I were playing where it would occasionally say “3,2,1 go!” or perhaps throw us off and say “3,2,1, snow!” or other rhymes.

Long story short it took me a while to figure out why I had to keep telling it to keep going and the story was so straightforward.

I system-prompted all my LLMs "Don't use cliches or stereotypical language." and they like me a lot less now.

They really like to blow sunshine up your ass don’t they? I have to do the same type of stuff. It’s like have to assure that I’m a big boy and I can handle mature content like programming in C

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