Why can't ChatGPT respond in plain English?

Question

This is something I&rsquo;ve noticed: ChatGPT (and its derivatives Bing et al) tend to respond either in the typical AI flavored language which comes off as trying to sound formal and professional but really just makes it look like an AI wrote it, it&rsquo;s very long and kind of corporate sounding but doesn&rsquo;t really get the point.OR, if you ask it to respond in plain English (or in simple English, or in a more direct, to the point tone - I&rsquo;ve tried a bunch of instructions without success), it responds in a more familial, personable tone, adding stuff like &ldquo;sure thing!&rdquo;.= I literally can&rsquo;t get it to reply in a way that is professional (ie not familial or personable) but also plain English that is simple, direct and to the point.What gives? How can I get it to respond the way I want?

muzani · Accepted Answer

It appears to be part of how it's trained. I believe this is part of the secret sauce of why it's so damn cheap. Have you tried custom instructions? Settings > Custom Instructions > How would you like ChatGPT to respond?
I can tweak the tone there, but its informal tone can be more cringe at times.
The API models are a lot better at this than the web-based ChatGPT, but still problematic. Most of the time when tone matters (e.g. dialogue, banter, actual chat), I'll use the completion models (i.e. davinci-002). GPT can be extremely good at tone but many don't realize it because the completion models are marked as legacy.

adamquek · Answer

Because of reinforcement learning. The reward model add more value for output that sounded formal and professional, and penalise those that are more casual or incomplete.You can finetune it to change the behaviour somewhat. But ultimately, there will be that AI flavour that you can't get rid of because of the way the LLM is trained.

gtirloni · Answer

I'd you're asking it to write in "plain English", that's your problem. Plain English is English that is easy to understand. The text ChatGPT writes is very easy to understand, if a bit too verbose.Add to your custom instructions something like "Always be concise and direct. Avoid filler words as much as possible".

vinniepukh · Answer

I've had success using custom instructions to get it to cut down on filler words and sentences, and answer the question to the point.

dave84 · Answer

Can you give example prompts and responses?

aristofun · Answer

Welcome to the "realization" phase of the bubble :)