I'll spare you the details, but a follow up "That's great. However, please rewrite it in the style of Ernest Hemingway." delivers concise, yet obviously Hemingway-esque emails. Example here: https://pastebin.com/rrkCMd8c It works much better in a two-step process. If "Write this email in the style of Ernest Hemingway" is affixed to the original prompt, the model will generate prose at length, defeating the purpose of being concise.
"That's great. However, please rewrite it in the concise style of Paul Graham," of course, works even better.
Asking a model to write an email as if it were written by Hemingway requires the model to generate a probability distribution based on the context of an email it needs to write + the style it needs to write it.
In the second approach, you've changed the model weights/inputs by including the email in the context window, so the task of predicting the next token is fundamentally different (and possibly easier) for the model.
It's also why models are sometimes bad at answering a factual question, but good at judging whether their own answer is correct.
“Please write a brief email from an employee to a boss giving an update on the api. The email should include 1. The /customers and /address endpoints are complete, but we're still waiting on the architecture team to finish the /orders spec. I'll also be taking Friday off.”
And then you had to adjust it. Just include the information you out into the prompt. If chatgpt can understand it, so can I.
I can’t wait to live in a world where someone enters bullet points into chatgpt to generate an email. Then I have to run the email through chatgpt to transform it back into bullet points.
Whether we want to admit it or not, not everyone has done the work to handle critique. Some people rely on ChatGPT as a digital scapegoat[1]. Rather than subject their own abilities and decisions to critique, they can launder them through ChatGPT and the psychological distance it affords, allows them to avoid feelings of anxiety - they can blame any negative response on ChatGPT.
Never under estimate the amount of time an energy people will spend on coping mechanisms.
1. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201312...
> The /customers and /address endpoints are complete, but we're still waiting on the architecture team to finish the /orders spec. I'll also be taking Friday off.
vs. garbage about gazelles, and the fact that telephones exist.
Turns into:
> Come Friday, I won't be in. Just one day. Things will continue, though. Any emergencies, I'm a call away.
Off is off, don't call me. Must have been trained on a lot of linkedin posts to volunteer your personal time like this.
Although, I don't know how he would feel about being mimic'ed million-fold.
> The /customers and /address endpoints: born, alive, breathing. The /orders endpoint: still trapped in the womb of the architecture team's thoughts.
> The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter. The artificial race has one really ineffective weapon, and that is imitation. - Mark Twain (paraphrased)
Best bit of the article.
Question for someone who knows more about this stuff. How likely is it to get the same response to the same prompt with gpt ? Does it have some kind of random seed applied behind the scenes?
-edit- Thank you for the responses. TIL.
You might read it, but you won't answer the same way as you do when "choose a nice wording." was added to the prompt.
Seems like we should all just be communicating via bullet points grug or Kevin Malone style.
"Tell the person that he's being an idiot asking me to turn on my cameras during the meetings but be subtle about it, I don't want to offend them."
That'll work.
We can dream.
- "I really really hate this line"
- "I love that line a little bit, hmm actually I read it a bit more and it started to stink"
- "This line feels a little too Vogue"
- "Can we make this a little more Arnold in Kindergarten Cop"
And it will distill that into something distinctly actionable. You have an interface to communicate your edits in the lowest friction way ever exposed by mankind and people are still trying to enter a prompt and Ctrl+C Ctrl+V.
There are situations that's not true, namely information retrieval, but I've yet to find it highly practical beyond being a fun experience.
Note. Milage varies based on targets
llm: emits excessively lengthy and polite prose
smtp: transports lengthy prose
llm: summarizes lentghy prose to bullet points
recipient: reads summary
what a wonderful waste of energy
I would know, I just asked it to write a privacy policy for me …
It would seem as if gestures of kindness are more likely to be fake compared to meanness, criticism, or other negativity. I think this is why 1-3 star reviews are so useful, same for reviews posted to reddit , because they are more critical.
Then I had to edit it myself because it was still too formal.
It didn't matter, she immediately called me out as soon as she read it. :)
Ten years from now it will all just be robots mailing each other and no one will understand why things keep breaking.