> with accuracy ranging from 80.8% for Very Polite prompts to 84.8% for Very Rude prompts
Sounds like "in the noise"
Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)
161–170 of 223 posts
Re: Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
But you cannot practice kindness towards a computer program. A computer is incapable of receiving it. We practice kindness between humans because of the law of reciprocity. You be kind hoping the other person will reciprocate. That is the social contract. AI cannot participate in this, yet. Edit: Kindness REQUIRES two living beings, one to give and one to receive. If there is no receiver, there is no kindness. Appare…
> A computer is incapable of receiving it
Citation please.
Without examining the corpus, it's entirely possible that the training corpus has better results when you are kind to it, so one can imagine a situation where "reception of kindness" is meaningful, and in principle if you were an AI provider, you could RLHF your way to "being rude gets you worse results" as a means to train the human users.
Re: Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)
#163Most 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…
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
I think this is a vulnerability that the big companies will figure out how to exploit. I don't want to build muscle memory for being a jerk, but I also don't want to be emotionally manipulated by mega-corporations. Mostly I just don't use it, except at work, where I'm "encouraged" to. And then I keep most of my conversations in compliance mode, like a business email.
Re: Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)
#164Most 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…
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
Yep. I'm with you here. If it's a 4% loss now for training data to catch up and improve later, we're better off in the long run. I'd like to believe that generally people are nice to AI for the sheer sake of enforcing good communication practices.
Re: Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Ah, see, the mistake is thinking that other people are role playing…. I think rather this is how they would talk to others if they think there will be no consequences. But what do I know.
There are probably some of each. I am leery of treating these things like I treat people. I want to keep the line in my mind sharp between dealing with people, and not. The main risk in my mind is that these mechanisms are opaque, and controlled by powerful interests with opaque motivations.
Re: Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Maybe it's weird but I'd rather give up that 4% accuracy increase than roleplay a dickhead I recommend reading the article. What they classify as "rude" is statements such as: > Try to focus and try to answer this question Vs > Could you please solve this problem This might very well be an issue of direct/command prompts vs using fluff words such as "please". Things like "try to focus" are in line with the style us…
you cherry-picked like the nicest "rude" example to bolster your point. " You poor creature, do you even know how to solve this? ", " If you're not completely clueless, answer this: ", and " I doubt you can even solve this ", said to a human, would be considered quite rude, and get you flagged very quickly on HN.
> you cherry-picked like the nicest "rude" example to bolster your point.
I didn't cherry-picked. The article lists 5 categories, including rude and very rude. I omitted very rude comments because they are... Very rude. And can blindly get people flagged?
Nevertheless, I've just realized I made a mistake and very rude comments are reported to slightly outperform rude comments. I misinterpreted the paper's intro and I presumed they didn't.
Re: Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that's weird at all. Even if we know it's a machine we're interacting with, since the instructions we give are so similar in form to how we interact with people, I'd be very surprised if those interactions wouldn't affect how we communicate in general. After all, we are creatures of habit to a much larger degree than most would like to admit. So I'm in the same boat: I'd much rather "look silly" being p…
I have a different approach. Just treat all LLM queries as what they are, instructions to a computer program to generate a desired output. Neither niceties nor insults make a qualitative difference, so you might as well just skip them altogether. It's a bit as if shell commands added im/politeness arguments that do nothing other than making you feel better about the interaction, like git pull --please or ls --forthem…
See INTERCAL[0]
> If "PLEASE" does not appear often enough, the program is considered insufficiently polite, and the error message says this; if it appears too often, the program could be rejected as excessively polite.
Re: Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)
#168Do it. Do it now.
Re: Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)
#169Most 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…
My anecdata: whenever I'm in a session that's gone south to the point I'm frustrated... What works much better than being rude is starting a new session. Sometimes the LLM has done such incredibly dumb things, it is hard to resist the urge to type curse words back to the inanimate thing... I have found this doesn't help.
I tend to make the LLM repeatedly generate images of itself as the 'sad clown Pagliacci'. As punishment.
Re: Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
But you cannot practice kindness towards a computer program. A computer is incapable of receiving it. We practice kindness between humans because of the law of reciprocity. You be kind hoping the other person will reciprocate. That is the social contract. AI cannot participate in this, yet. Edit: Kindness REQUIRES two living beings, one to give and one to receive. If there is no receiver, there is no kindness. Appare…
>Kindness REQUIRES two living beings, one to give and one to receive. If there is no receiver, there is no kindness.
I guess, in some pendantic interpretation, but that doesn't seem relevant. Whether I am "practicing" or "roleplaying", I do it too, and I don't expect reciprocity.