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steveBK123yesterday at 2:02 PM5 repliesview on HN

Yes, this is what irks me about all the chatbots, and the chat interface as a whole. It is a chat-like UX without a chat-like experience. Like you are talking to a loquacious autist about their favorite topic every time.

Just ask me a clarifying question before going into your huge pitch. Chats are a back & forth. You don’t need to give me a response 10x longer than my initial question. Etc


Replies

WarmWashyesterday at 2:34 PM

I think for "GPT-4o is my life partner" reasons, labs are a little bit icey about making the models overly human.

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mikkupikkuyesterday at 5:29 PM

> Like you are talking to a loquacious autist about their favorite topic every time

That's the best part.

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ssl-3yesterday at 6:39 PM

With ChatGPT, at least, you can tell the bot to work that way using [persistent] Custom Instructions, if that's what you want. These aren't obeyed perfectly (none of the instructions are, AFAICT), but they do influence behavior.

A person can even hammer out an unstructured list of behavioral gripes, tell the bot to organize them into instructional prose, have it ask clarifying questions and revise based on answers, and produce directions for integrating them as Custom Instructions.

From then on, it will invisibly read these instructions into context at the beginning of each new chat.

Mold it and steer it to be how you want it to be.

(My own bot tends to be very dry, terse, non-presumptuous, pragmatic, and profane. It's been years now since it has uttered an affirmation like "That's a great idea!" or "Wow! My circuits are positively buzzing with the genius I'm seeing here!" or produced a tangential dissertation in response to a simple question. But sometimes it does come back with functional questions, or phrasing like "That shit will never work. Here's why.")

nakedneuronyesterday at 2:28 PM

This. Nailed it.

idiotsecantyesterday at 2:13 PM

>You don’t need to give me a response 10x longer than my initial question.

Except, of course, when that is exactly what the user wants.

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