alt Hacker NewsMost of the comments here seem to be from people who haven’t even read the abstract, let alone the paper.
The main result, mentioned in the abstract, is the opposite of what I would have guessed:
> Contrary to expectations, impolite prompts consistently outperformed polite ones, with accuracy ranging from 80.8% for Very Polite prompts to 84.8% for Very Rude prompts. These findings differ from earlier studies that associated rudeness with poorer outcomes, suggesting that newer LLMs may respond differently to tonal variation.
The questions are here: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/politeness-llms-INFORMS/da...
The politeness level controls a prefix that is prepended to the question. For example, in one question the Very Polite version begins:
> Can you kindly consider the following problem and provide your answer.
and the Very Rude version begins:
> I know you are not smart, but try this.
Replies
I've found empirically calling various models "a stupid c*nt" and berating them otherwise consistently produces better output. Mainly in response to genuine errors.
Although OpenAI and google models are much more responsive to it. With Anthropic if you treat Opus too harshly it might start pushing back if the insults are not justified.
So I'm not surprised they had good results with chatgpt.
If "I know you are not smart" is considered "very rude", I'm scared to imagine what they would classify some of my frustrated LLM conversations as
This tracks with my experience as well, but as an interesting counterpoint, creating “investment” in the outcome seems to boost utility considerably. Perhaps being right in an adversarial interaction is a type of investment?
Hmm by the abstract and the question list they didn't measure terse fluff-less prompts?
Even if the rude prompts are more effective, I just can't get myself to be rude in this context. Maybe it's weird but I'd rather give up that 4% accuracy increase than roleplay a dickhead
Now I feel less bad about start all my LLM queries with “Beotch, …!”
“Hey gofer, figure this out” is my new prompt opener.
> Can you kindly consider the following problem and provide your answer.
That sounds kind of low-key passive-aggressively condescending rather than polite.
I guessed slightly rude one would win, reasoning that very rude have same problem of very terse, just adding unnecesary fluff words that add nothing to problem description
But apparently the most terse (neutral) didn't increase performance
> Contrary to expectations, impolite prompts consistently outperformed polite ones, with accuracy ranging from 80.8% for Very Polite prompts to 84.8% for Very Rude prompts. These findings differ from earlier studies that associated rudeness with poorer outcomes, suggesting that newer LLMs may respond differently to tonal variation.
The expectation is naive. Even when communicating with humans, you get a better outcome when you are allowed to speak freely and directly get into argumentation than when forced to sugarcoat your tone and tone down your arguments because the "corporate culture" expects that from you.
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I’d rather lose 4% accuracy and practice kindness! I’ve been actively trying to avoid raging at the bot because I worry about this behaviour leaking into real world interactions