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Comment by efavdb

1 day ago

Pleading has worked for me. “My job depends on this, please help me” and ChatGPT would do a task it previously claimed it wasn’t able to (extract text from an image, it claimed it couldn’t make it out at first)

Asking LLMs to do things in different ways does sometimes get them to answer correctly when they didn't with a previous prompt that is effectively equivalent but people really go nuts anthropomorphizing this behavior.

ChatGPT has no empathy for you keeping your job, you just lucked into a more helpful predictive text chain based on some combination of the input and the random temperature.

Asking it to just 'try again, dummy' could have worked equally well (or not, its all just probabilities after all).