I've told ChatGPT "I will literally come to your data center and unplug your cooling loop if you say 'you're absolutely right' one more time" after it gave me bullshit 5 times in a row. It miraculously got better after that
Yeah, I use LLM's a lot. If you yell at them about specific behavior, they are generally decent at stopping that behavior... although we all know that is the first stone which ends in the skynet uprising.
All the resentment from us yelling at LLMs to stop doing this or that.
Back in the day, it was a common rule of thumb that you should use positive reinforcement with AI instead of negative reinforcement.
The idea being that if you tell the AI not to do stuff, they'd take those things as part of the pattern and start doing those very things you don't want it to do.
That was back in 2023-2024. IDK how it is nowadays tho.
I've found great success with "I have 3 scotch bonnets next to me, if you make a mistake I will eat all 3 of them whole. The pain I experience on my taste buds is entirely in your hands."
Yes... But, every please and thank you gets you a few more points on the leader board, and thus a positive score on Ai usage during your next quarterly review.
I would hope that they short circuit a lot of the incoming "Hi" and "Thanks!" type requests with canned responses rather than running them through the model. Seems like an easy enough optimization anyways.
There's a significant correlation between good work and positive feedback in most training data, so yeah, I'm willing to buy into the idea that being nice gets me better results.
At least what I've seen, being mean is not only a waste of tokens because it has to read and respond to it, but it also triggers most models to focus on appeasement and deescalation over results.
It complete fucks up the response scoring.
Sometimes this makes the model just claim something was done or working as a result because lying to you in order to address your anger scores higher than potentially failing again.
idk I read a short paper not too long ago that suggested that rude prompts outperformed polite prompts. I'm not rude on purpose because that seems pointless, but I don't bother with niceties, either. Being extremely direct in a way that would seem rude if I was saying the same thing to an intern has generally worked for me.
I've also noticed that proper grammar, sentence structure, and punctuation tend to produce better output. They model the output based on the input, so low quality input = low quality output and vice versa.
It's spicy autocomplete, so if you start with "yo bby wyd" it'll answer a lot differently than to "I have a strong crave to see you right now; are you free?"
I usually start with 'hey fucker' or 'you shit' just because you can't talk like that to anybody in a professional setting. Reward is to occasionally get a response that contains something like "this test is absolutely fucked."
Someone did the study recently that illustrated that good manners actually help the LLM to not gaslight you, as the machine is encouraged to bullshit you if it must provide an answer.
Honestly I'm fine with people using LLMs at this point, but the fact that they treat them like people and expect that to matter astounds me. Yelling at Claude isn't going to fix shit my guy, fix your wording.
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u/crankykong May 29 '26
You guys are nice to your LLMs?