ChatGPT – Truth over comfort instruction set
33 comments
·October 12, 2025password54321
bwfan123
addendum: The ground truth for an LLM is the training dataset. Whereas the ground truth for a human is their own experience/qualia with actions in the world. You may argue that only a few of us are willing to engage with the world - and we take most things as told just like the LLMs. Fair enough. But we still have the option to engage with the world, and the LLMs dont.
jonplackett
The LLMs we get to use have been prompt engineered and post-trained so much that I doubt the training data is their main influence anymore. If it was you couldn’t change their entire behaviour by adding a few sentences to the personalisation section.
unshavedyak
I'm just an ignorant bystander, but is the training dataset the ground truth?
Kind of feels like calling the fruit you put into the blender the ground truth, but the meaning of the apple is kinda lost in the soup.
Now i'm not a hater by any means. I am just not sure this is the correct way to define the structured "meaning" (for lack of a better word) that we see come out of LLM complexity. It is, i thought, a very lossy operation and so the structure of the inputs may or (more likely) may not provide a like-structured output.
qgin
I tried similar instructions and found it doesn't so much enable Truth Mode as it enables Edgelord Mode.
stavros
I wonder whether this is just a different form of bias, where ChatGPT just sounds harsher without necessarily corresponding to reality more. Maybe the example in the article indicates that it's more than that.
ACCount37
"Unwillingness to be harsh to the user" is a major source of "divorce from reality" in LLMs.
They are all way too high on the agreeableness, likely from RLHF and SFT for instruction-following. And don't get me started on what training on thumbs up/thumbs down user feedback does.
SketchySeaBeast
But if we look at the article's example, the two barely diverge. I don't think either of the texts are less divorced from reality than the other. The second is more "truthful" (read: cynical), but they are largely the same.
ecshafer
This looks like the only thing these instructions do is reduce emojis, highlighting/bolding, and removes a couple flavor words. The content is identical, the arguments the same. This doesn't really seem to be useful when you are asking a truth based statement.
lxgr
> Asked about the answer, ChatGPT points to the instruction set and that it allowed it to add additional statements: [...]
I don't think this is how this works. It's debatable whether current LLMs have any theory of mind at all, and even if they do, whether their model of themselves (i.e. their own "mental states") is sophisticated enough to make such a prediction.
Even humans aren't that great at predicting how they would have acted under slightly different premises! Why should LLMs fare much better?
Imnimo
This is basically Ouija board for LLMs. You're not making it more true, you're making it sound more like what you want to hear.
SketchySeaBeast
Tone over truth over comfort instruction set.
topaz0
Or just "discomfort over comfort", and truth has nothing to do with it.
SketchySeaBeast
Yeah, that's better.
throawayonthe
> ... a pain in the ass for people using ChatGPT to try to get close to the truth.
i think you may be the easily-influenced user
andersa
I've personally found that the "Robot" personality you can choose on that Personalize menu provides best results without cursed custom instructions. It removes all the emoji and emotional support babble and actually allows it to answer a question with just a single sentence "No, because X."
em500
I usually instruct the LLMs to assume to Vulcan / Spock personality. Now that computers can more or less pass for a human, I realize I don't want them to sound human.
guerrilla
If the author is reading this, it should say "Err on the side of bluntness" not "Error".
qgin
The fact that the model didn't point that out to the author brings the whole premise into question.
starmftronajoll
This is just a different flavor of comfort.
jonplackett
Yeah - I was expecting a lot more of a difference to warrant an entire article written about it.
8cvor6j844qw_d6
I have always thought that these instructions are for "tone" or formatting rather than having real effect on quality/accuracy/correctness/etc.
null
lxgr
There's definitely a "glazing" axis/dimension in some of them (cough, GPT-4o), presumably trained into them via many users giving a "thumbs up" to the things that make them feel better about themselves. That dimension doesn't always correlate well with truthfulness.
If that's the case, it's not implausible that that dimension can be accessed in a relatively straightforward way by asking for more or less of it.
RugnirViking
> That can be helpful for the (imagined?) easily-influenced user, but a pain in the ass for people using ChatGPT to try to get close to the truth.
see, where you're going wrong is that you're using an LLM to try to "get to the truth". People will do literally anything to avoid reading a book
onraglanroad
Books will lie to you just as much as an LLM.
This is not how LLMs work. You aren't 'unlocking' the "Truth" as it doesn't know what the "Truth" is. It is just pattern matching to words that match the style you are looking for. It may be more accurate for you in some cases but this is not a "Truth" instruction set as there is no such thing.