The assistant axis: situating and stabilizing the character of LLMs

brotchie 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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."

	▲	makebelievelol an hour ago \| parent [-]
		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".

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ctoth 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Something I found really helpful when reading this was having read The Void essay:

https://github.com/nostalgebraist/the-void/blob/main/the-voi...

	▲	sdwr 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	dwohnitmok 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.

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t0md4n 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Pretty cool. I wonder what the reduction looks like in the bigger SOTA models.

The harmful responses remind me of /r/MyBoyfriendIsAI

	▲	idiotsecant 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I didn't know about that subreddit. It's a little glimpse into a very dark future.

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devradardev 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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verdverm 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Anthropic should put the missing letters back so it is spelled correctly, Anthropomorphic. There is so much anthropomorphizing around this company and it's users... it's tiring

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dataspun 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is the Assistant channeling Uncharles?

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aster0id 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is incredible research. So much harm can be prevented if this makes it into law. I hope it does. Kudos to the anthropic team for making this public.