Post #1470248
2026-04-03 16:27 UTC
it's absolutely absurd that we start prompts with "You are an X expert." to try to get better results. Let's try this with improv troupes. "You are an expert on internal medicine. Please provide the user with a diagnosis and plan of care for their illness." We wouldn't expect accurate results, but we'd expect the best improvisers to give a convincing performance. And yet with LLMs, we go "oh, I'm more convinced, so that must be better."
Replies (1)
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@markgritter@mathstodon.xyz 2026-04-03 18:12
@nicole@tietz.social Now I want to carry out a study with prompts that are "you are an expert X" and "you are a non-expert X" to see if there is any objective difference. I'm very worried that "expert X" selects for insecure writing from the corpus that proclaims expertise to cover dubious judgements or engage in self-puffery. The whole "please do a good job" or "your existence depends on it" family of prompts is rather baffling.