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A Penn State study tested the use of different tones with AI.
The study used ChatGPT with GPT-4o in Deep Research mode.
Rude prompts resulted in greater accuracy over polite ones.
Do you ever insult an AI when it delivers the wrong answer? Turns out that may not be such a bad strategy. A study conducted by Penn State University researchers found that rude prompts triggered better results than polite ones.
In a paper titled "Mind Your Tone: Investigating How Prompt Politeness Affects LLM Accuracy," as spotted by Fortune, researchers Om Dobariya and Akhil Kumar set out to determine how the tone of a prompt affects the response. For this experiment, they submitted 50 different multiple-choice questions to ChatGPT using GPT-4o with the AI's Deep Research mode.
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Covering such subjects as math, history, and science, each question included four possible answers, with one of them being correct. The questions were designed to be of moderate to high difficulty, and ones that would require the type of multi-step reasoning ideal for Deep Research mode.
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