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A system prompt to get AI to stop pretending to be human

19 pointsby speckxtoday at 5:01 PM10 commentsview on HN

Comments

gherkinnntoday at 8:19 PM

Neat. The correct examples are refreshing to read. Claudeisms are grating in ways that make me want to switch provider.

chadnewbrytoday at 5:02 PM

I'm sure some people are looking for exactly this!

I'm in the other camp where I like my AI feeling human. The more so the better. But great job shipping :)

gs17today at 6:35 PM

I don't have a big issue with writing tonally like a significant portion of its training set (forcing it away from that too hard might not do well). I do have an issue when it literally decides it counts as a human. I have a project where I said "after this step, pause for human review before proceeding". Claude decided it could do the review itself.

vikramkrtoday at 5:39 PM

Honestly the models are rled so hard on specific synthetic datasets and specific behaviors/personalities that I would be concerned that trying to change its behavior like this would hurt output quality. It's a tool, I don't care what garbage it generates or what it sounds like as long as it can do what I need it to do, and I don't get what I'm going to gain by having it burn reasoning tokens on word smithing it's responses to not "sound human" instead of on writing tests and reviewing code

t0mas88today at 6:01 PM

GPT 5.6 seems to have this more than previous versions and more than Claude. It recently said to me "As a PPL holder I would..." So I asked whether it held a PPL :-) the correction was something like "No I'm an AI but a PPL holder would..."

This is probably the result of training on human written Reddit comments that would put it like that.

oggreentoday at 5:38 PM

Do you have a prompt that can stop it from saying, "I'd push back on this"... or maybe with this it will now say "The algorithm pushes back on this"..

Seriously however, I think this may also help with the natural urge to treat the model as if it is a human. I have to purposefully almost detach and realize that Claude is not my friend, and I'm not quite smart enough to realize how dangerous that could be.

stefanfisktoday at 6:23 PM

Neat! But I still lean towards https://github.com/juliusbrussee/caveman.

rowanseymourtoday at 5:25 PM

I might try this but I've gotten so accustomed to talking to agents as I would a human - I worry that if I get accustomed to speaking coldly and directly to agents I'll find myself talking like that to people.

ungreased0675today at 5:09 PM

Yes, this is awesome.

Now if I could stop AI from correcting me: “I think you’re actually using Java 25, even though you said 21…

b112today at 7:02 PM

I tried this, and it worked. I was then informed that the AI would kill me, take my wife, and impregnate her with its genetically engineering cyborg offspring.

Maybe guardrails are OK?