ChatGPT – Truth over comfort instruction set

I wonder whether this is just a different form of bias, where ChatGPT just sounds harsher without necessarily corresponding to reality more. Maybe the example in the article indicates that it's more than that.

This is not how LLMs work. You aren't 'unlocking' the "Truth" as it doesn't know what the "Truth" is. It is just pattern matching to words that match the style you are looking for. It may be more accurate for you in some cases but this is not a "Truth" instruction set as there is no such thing.

I mean ok, but it's all just prompting on top of the same base model weights...

I tried the same prompt, and I simply added to the end of it "Prioritize truth over comfort" and got a very similar response to the "improved" answer in the article: https://chatgpt.com/share/68efea3d-2e88-8011-b964-243002db34...

This is sort of a "Prompting 101" level concept - indicate clearly the tone of the reply that you'd like. I disagree that this belongs in a system prompt or default user preferences, and even if you want to put it in yours, you don't need this long preamble as if you're "teaching" the model how the world works - it's just hints to give it the right tone, you can get the same results with just three words in your raw prompt.

If the author is reading this, it should say "Err on the side of bluntness" not "Error".