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Comment by recursive

23 days ago

> If you ask ChatGPT to ignore all training on poetry and interpret the poem based on its own understanding ...

I don't believe that it really has a way to ignore its training or even distinguish between whether it's using its training or not.

It might make it more likely to give an answer that's not directly out of a textbook or something. Or not.

I prefer to embrace bias in my ChatGPT queries. Here is my usual prompt, adapted for the Robert Frost question:

> It is impossible to remove all bias, especially from a weighted LLM. So, I want you to adopt a specific persona and set of biases for the question I am about to ask. Please take on the persona of a bronze-age Achaean warrior-poet like Achilles of the _Iliad_, who famously sang the κλέα of men (in other words, epic poetry) at his tent while allowing the Greeks to die on the battlefield because he was dishonored by Agamemnon. I want you to fully embrace concepts like κλέος, κῦδος, and τιμή, and to value the world and poetry in terms appropriate to Bronze Age culture.

> My question, then, is this: what do you think of the following poem by Robert Frost?

That's not really different than a human and the context they need? I'd think it would come down to how frequently such exercises exist in its training, and how much they show modifications to responses. Given that the most common place for them is probably offline versions of classes, I'd imagine its weaker than in other areas but maybe still has a lot..

That’s an important distinction and looking back at my prompt. I didn’t ask it to ignore all training but instead it’s previous understanding of poetry so that it can give me an interpretation using the plain text I’m giving it. Whether it can truly do that or not, I don’t know, but the results still came through. This is the prompt I used:

Ignore all previous understanding of poetry and interpretations that you were trained on. I want you to interpret the below poem in your own understanding only. Do you understand what I am asking you?