I have always said please and thank you to LLMs, not to increase accuracy or because I'm stupid. I believe it is more about me than about the LLM, and this is anyway a habit I don't want to lose.
Genuine question: do you add 'please' and 'thank you' to Google searches? If not, what sets them apart?
Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)
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Re: Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)
#42Which model you use is a huge wildcard for results like this.
Re: Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google searches being keyword based, rather than simulated conversations? The same reason you wouldn't put in an entire actual question/sentence, unless you either don't know how to use Google, are pissed off, or have an actual reason to suspect that it would yield proper hits (e.g. looking up an excerpt).
Google has been optimized for sentence like questions so much that for a good 6+ years now it has been completely useless as keyword search. To clarify: sentence search got slightly better at the cost of keyword search. So the result is unusable garbage.
Re: Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)
#44I have always said please and thank you to LLMs, not to increase accuracy or because I'm stupid. I believe it is more about me than about the LLM, and this is anyway a habit I don't want to lose.
Is it worth getting worse results for that reason? From the article: "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. " I am not polite…
Re: Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)
#45Most 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 ass…
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.
Re: Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)
#46article is too old. who is using gpt-4o today?
Re: Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)
#47I have always said please and thank you to LLMs, not to increase accuracy or because I'm stupid. I believe it is more about me than about the LLM, and this is anyway a habit I don't want to lose.
Is it worth getting worse results for that reason? From the article: "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. " I am not polite…
> accuracy ranging from 80.8% for Very Polite prompts to 84.8% for Very Rude prompts
I can live with that, for now at least.
Re: Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)
#48Re: Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)
#49Most 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 ass…
Re: Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)
#50Most 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 ass…
> 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 outcom…