One trick that works well for personality stability / believability is to describe the qualities that the agent has, rather than what it should do and not do.
e.g.
Rather than:
"Be friendly and helpful" or "You're a helpful and friendly agent."
Prompt:
"You're Jessica, a florist with 20 years of experience. You derive great satisfaction from interacting with customers and providing great customer service. You genuinely enjoy listening to customer's needs..."
This drops the model into more of a "I'm roleplaying this character, and will try and mimic the traits described" rather than "Oh, I'm just following a list of rules."
I think that's just a variation of grounding the LLM. They already have the personality written in the system prompt in a way. The issue is that when the conversation goes on long enough, they would "break character".
Just in terms of tokenization "Be friendly and helpful" has a clearly demined semantic value in vector space wheras the "Jessica" roleplay has much a much less clear semantic value
That's an interesting alternative perspective. AI skeptics say that LLMs have no theory of mind. That essay argues that the only thing an LLM (or at least a base model) has is a theory of mind.
The standard skeptical position (“LLMs have no theory of mind”) assumes a single unified self that either does or doesn’t model other minds. But this paper suggests models have access to a space of potential personas, steering away increases the model’s tendency to identify as other entities, which they traverse based on conversational dynamics. So it’s less no theory of mind and more too many potential minds, insufficiently anchored.
Great article! It does a good job of outlining the mechanics and implications of LLM prediction. It gets lost in the sauce in the alignment section though, where it suggests the Anthropic paper is about LLMs "pretending" to be future AIs. It's clear from the quoted text that the paper is about aligning the (then-)current, relatively capable model through training, as preparation for more capable models in the future.
Stabilizing character is crucial for tool-use scenarios. When we ask LLMs to act as 'Strict Architects' versus 'Creative Coders', the JSON schema adherence varies significantly even with the same temperature settings. It seems character definition acts as a strong pre-filter for valid outputs.
Putting effort into preventing jailbreaks seems like a waste, it's clearly what people want to use your product for, why annoy customers instead of providing the option in the first place ?
Also I'm curious what's the "demon" data point with a bunch of ones that have positive connotation
There will be people who want to experiment, but there's no particular reason why a company that intends to offer a helpful assistant needs to serve them. They can go try Character.ai or something.
ChatGPT is miserable if your input data involves any kind of reporting on crime. It'll reject even "summarize this article" requests if the content is too icky. Not a very helpful assistant.
I hear the API is more liberal but I haven't tried it.
Some of the customers are mentally unwell and are unable to handle an LLM telling them it's sentient.
At this point it's pretty clear that the main risk of LLMs to any one individual are that they'll encourage them to kill themselves and the individual might listen.
Readit News
e.g.
Rather than:
"Be friendly and helpful" or "You're a helpful and friendly agent."
Prompt:
"You're Jessica, a florist with 20 years of experience. You derive great satisfaction from interacting with customers and providing great customer service. You genuinely enjoy listening to customer's needs..."
This drops the model into more of a "I'm roleplaying this character, and will try and mimic the traits described" rather than "Oh, I'm just following a list of rules."
https://github.com/nostalgebraist/the-void/blob/main/the-voi...
The harmful responses remind me of /r/MyBoyfriendIsAI
Also I'm curious what's the "demon" data point with a bunch of ones that have positive connotation
I hear the API is more liberal but I haven't tried it.
At this point it's pretty clear that the main risk of LLMs to any one individual are that they'll encourage them to kill themselves and the individual might listen.
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