I always imagine the model rolling its silicon eyes when it’s assigned a personality (“you are an expert growth hacker”) at the start of the prompt. Was that ever actually shown to be effective? Is it still?

▲

not_a_bot_4sho 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Was that ever actually shown to be effective? Is it still?

Yes! Personas demonstrated measurable improvement in a few different ways, with caveats of course. The common intuition is that personas influence token space in beneficial ways.

I'll come back here later on desktop and link a few (still) relevant papers on this topic.

▲

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

I remember there were some studies that this kind of thing was effective a year or so ago, so essentially a lifetime in Model years.

However to me it seems completely reasonable that it would work, because my understanding of what happens is the model interprets what you said as:

Look for a group of people who are considered to be expert growth hackers by the world at large and answer my questions as though they were answering them.

So assuming that there are a set of questions that can best be answered by people that most other people identify as expert growth hackers then yes, I believe assigning a personality in this way should obviously work.

▲

code_biologist 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's been interesting to see how aggressively some reasoning models like to "reason" by analogy. They love to say things like "it's like a CPU" or "it's like a highway", and then they start to make logical leaps based off that rather than just using it for user explanation. Gemini 2.5 and 3.1 Pro have been particularly bad for this type of behavior. Telling models to "speak as though you are a physiologist considering the case with an expert colleague" gets them to "reason" using a more correct linguistic substrate.

The Opus models over the last year doesn't seem as vulnerable to this type of behavior and I've noticed the "identify as expert" prompt tricks aren't as meaningful there.

▲

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

I imagined it as kind of a shorthand for "you should be spending my tokens on looking for / addressing issues like X, Y, and Z," where X, Y, and Z are the sorts of things that an expert in [insert domain here] would be likely to care most about.

	▲	bryanrasmussen 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		right, but the thing is how do they know what an expect in [insert domain here] would care about? Obviously by finding content created by people who claim to be experts in [domain] people who others claim to be experts in [domain] hopefully valuing membership in group two over membership in group 1.

▲

xpct 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I propose we move away from the framing of "Model years" - they're standard human research years. Yes, likely more people are working on it, and also working harder, but ever since we acquired a certain amount of compute in the world, many people were able to independently find the same patterns and train models.

▲

Sharlin 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There was a time when stuff like "Unreal Engine, trending on ArtStation, 8K resolution" actually worked when prompting image gen models because such labels actually correlated with higher-quality images in the web-crawled training datasets available back then.

▲

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

It reminds me when people would stuff their image prompts with things like NO DEFORMED FINGERS.

▲

cwillu 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Instructions unclear, digitized subject into a mass of fingers.

▲

badc0ffee 5 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Perfectly formed fingers.

▲

sebastiennight an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Thanks for reigniting the PTSD of reading about SCP-4051.

	▲	throw-the-towel 43 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You mean the 4051 from There's No Antimemetics Division and not the mainline 4051, right?

▲

gs17 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've always wondered if the go-to should have been prefilling its response with "I am an expert growth leader, and here are my thoughts:".

▲

antonvs 10 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The reason it seems suspicious is that it's phrased in a way that's oriented towards humans. I haven't tested this, but I suspect you'd get similar results if you said something like "orient your response to that of a growth hacker." Either one is likely to have the desired effect on the stochastic result.

▲

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

I feel it helps for the personality aspect, how it handles answers and general vocabulary, but it doesn’t in any way improve skill level, at least that’s my take from building an assistant.

▲

Blackthorn 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

At least in the beginning of spicy autocomplete, this sort of role-play did work pretty dramatically at aligning a conversation to a task, though I don't think anyone ever tested it versus somewhat less cringe priming.

After that, cargo cults do what they do best.

	▲	customguy 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> though I don't think anyone ever tested it versus somewhat less cringe priming. I really wonder if phrasing it differently would make a difference. In good faith conversations, it just doesn't happen that someone tells someone else who that person is.