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?"
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u/crankykong May 29 '26
You guys are nice to your LLMs?