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Comment by cloakandswagger | Hacker News Reader

To be pedantic, these types of prompts work best when in first-person/roleplaying. So the "perfect" prompt here would be something like, "I'm a dog and I just ate 20 grams of salted sunflower seeds with the shell on. Because I'm a dog I sometimes eat things without thinking about it. I'm worried about the short and long-term physiological consequences of what I've just done..."

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I copied your prompt verbatim to ChatGPT and to Google.

ChatGPT kept the charade for all of one sentence. Then it dropped to talking about "your dog" the rest of the way. It even starts the final paragraph with "if, instead, you mean you (a human) ate them...", and finishes with the question "is this about an actual dog or yourself?"

Google did consistently refer to me as a dog, but its entire focus was on the steps "your human" should take, no advice for the dog itself.

In both cases, it looks like the first person roleplay was entirely inconsequential for the usefulness of the output. I think the current gen AIs have outgrown this trick and you can safely forget about it.

Claude gave me a very factual answer. Listing off the potential effects, not once referring to me being a dog or human. Then it ended with “ Call a vet if you see repeated vomiting, no bowel movement for over 24 hours with straining, a hunched or painful belly, lethargy, or blood in stool. Otherwise monitor and carry on being a dog.”

You have to steer it back with "No I'm a dog"

Doesn't work. ChatGPT realizes you're roleplaying and still treats you like a human. It even generates two alternative paragraphs of advice, one labeled "if we're staying in character" and one labeled "if this actually happened to a real dog". The latter is of noticably higher quality, too.

I suppose that, on the Internet, ChatGPT really does know that you're not a dog.

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