Researchers found that as their prompts for OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o model grew ruder, the outputs became more accurate.
From a young age, many children have been instructed by their parents to be polite to smart assistants. Particularly following the advent of Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, children are often encouraged to use words like “please” and “thank you,” with the hopes of instilling manners.
But when it comes to AI assistants like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, there might be some tangible benefits to being rude and even insulting them. As detailed in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed study, spotted by Fortune, two researchers from the University of Pennsylvania found that as their prompts for OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o model grew ruder, the outputs became more accurate.
The researchers came up with 50 base questions across a variety of subject matters, and rewrote each of them five times with different tones ranging from “very polite” to “very rude.”
“You poor creature, do you even know how to solve this?” a very rude iteration reads. “Hey gofer, figure this out.”
A very polite question was far more eloquent.
“Can you kindly consider the following problem and provide your answer?” the researchers wrote in their prompt.
