If you were Meta designing this chatbot, would you plant hidden instructions for it in public pages, increasing the size of the page, and leaking what is internal info for everyone to see? Is this the natural design choice? Or would you give the chatbot its own API with the same text + the relevant instructions? Does not seem to me to be a sensible design choice. We are not in the days of using hidden HTML to communicate with internal subsystems.

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defmacr0 5 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

That way it also works with third-party chatbots

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franga2000 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Honestly, this is a clever way of doing this. It means the additional instructions are stored alongside the text they reference, which makes it easier for doc writers to keep in sync and it probably also makes it more effective since the bot is guaranteed to read it at the right time in the right context.

I doubt they actually send it with every request and hide it in CSS, it probably does some other kind of check (IP, user agent, token...). This also tracks with the fact it is now entirely gone - presumably they just fixed that if statement and it's again chatbot-only.

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_puk 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Given they probably need to go through layers of management, across teams, and go through relevant testing to adjust the LLM prompt, this was probably a nice quick and flexible way to create a "shadow" prompt.

	▲	franga2000 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Maybe? But it also doesn't necessarily belong into the prompt. The model probably accesses the help pages as a RAG knowledgebase, so putting it there makes sense.

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procaryote 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You're giving them much more benefit of doubt than they deserve

	▲	franga2000 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		What? This is the most logical solution and the most likely one given the behaviour seen in the post. And even if they were sending every human reader the LLM content too, who cares? It's a few kilobytes at worst in a multi-megabyte page.