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

#1

Post by speckx » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 5:01 PM UTC

A system prompt to get AI to stop pretending to be human
swiftrocks.com

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

#2

Post by chadnewbry » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 5:02 PM UTC

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 :)

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

#3

Post by ungreased0675 » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 5:09 PM UTC

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…

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

#4

Post by rowanseymour » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 5:25 PM UTC

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.

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

#5

Post by oggreen » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 5:38 PM UTC

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.

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

#6

Post by vikramkr » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 5:39 PM UTC

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

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

#7

Post by t0mas88 » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 6:01 PM UTC

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.

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

#8

Post by stefanfisk » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 6:23 PM UTC

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

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

#9

Post by gs17 » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 6:35 PM UTC

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.

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

#10

Post by b112 » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 7:02 PM UTC

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?