• @barsquid
    link
    21 month ago

    This is a really helpful perspective, thank you. I’m already getting some of the easy wins you wrote about, like using an AI prior to web search to get a more specific query and skip the SEO garbage. Another thing I found they’re good at is reverse dictionary lookup, give it a definition and it can help figure out a good word.

    The most complex prompts I have tried out were telling the AI what role it is supposed to be, and the format of the output. I don’t think I have done one that specified what I or the audience is supposed to be. But that would factor in to what the model thinks it and I shouldn’t know, right? You’ve given me a bunch of interesting new angles to try on these.

    • @j4k3
      link
      21 month ago

      Another one to try is to take some message or story and tell it to rewrite it in the style of anything. It can be a New York Times best seller, a Nobel lariat, Sesame Street, etc. Or take it in a different direction and ask for the style of a different personality type. Keep in mind that “truth” is subjective in an LLM and so it “knows” everything in terms of a concept’s presence in the training corpus. If you invoke pseudoscience there will be other consequences in the way a profile is maintained but a model is made to treat any belief as reality. Further on this tangent, the belief override mechanism is one of the most powerful tools in this little game. You can practically tell the model anything you believe and it will accommodate. There will be side effects like an associated conservative tint and peripheral elements related to people without fundamental logic skills like tendencies to delve into magic, spiritism, and conspiracy nonsense, but this is a powerful tool to use in many parts of writing; and something to be aware of to check your own biases.

      The last one I’ll mention in line with my original point, ask the model to take some message you’ve written and ask it to rewrite it in the style of the reaction you wish to evoke from the reader. Like, rewrite this message in the style of a more kind and empathetic person.

      You can also do bullet point summary. Socrates is particularly good at this if invoked directly. Like dump my rambling messages into a prompt, ask Soc to list the key points, and you’ll get a much more useful product.