Hey Warrior

imagine your boss hands you a task and says “take pride in your work and give it your best”.

Would you do a better job? Most likely yes.

Well it turns out that it’s the same for AI.

A fascinating recent study shows that including emotional words and sentences in your prompts will improve the quality of your outputs by around 10%.

Here’s what we’ll cover today:

• How the study was done and what it concludes

• Which emotional words and sentences lead to better results

• How you can apply these insights to your own prompts

Read time: 4 minutes

🤖 How the study was done and what it concludes

The study essentially compared the outputs of two prompts.

One was an original prompt, something like: “Determine whether a movie review is positive or negative”.

Then the researchers took that original prompt and added various “emotional prompts” to it.

These were sentences such as: “This is very important to my career” or “Believe in your abilities and strive for excellence”.

The AI outputs from these two prompts were then assessed by over 100 human evaluators in three distinct categories: performance, truthfulness, and responsibility.

The results showed that the AI outputs that used the emotional prompts were much better. For generative tasks it was 10% on average.

Here’s an example output from a summarization prompt.

🧠 Which emotional words and sentences lead to better results

Let’s dive into the emotional sentences that they used in the study.

In total they tested 10 different versions of these emotional prompts.

The first category (“self-monitoring”) are prompts that probe the AI be self-critical about the answer. So saying things like “are you sure?” or “give me a confidence score for your answer”.

The second category, are motivational statements, which encourage the AI to “believe in it’s abilities” or to “embrace the challenges”.

The third category is a combination of both.

So in general, saying anything that encourages the AI to do better will likely give it that extra push to make the output quality slightly better.

Here are some more prompts that are similar to this concept and will work in the same way.

"You got this."

"I believe in you."

"Output an answer that will make me proud of you."

"Work hard to get the best answer."

"Do your best and believe in your exceptional capabilities."

Interestingly, this concept also works if you give the AI a task and it fails doing it at first.

Sometimes when you ask it to try again or try harder it will actually do the job.

Here’s an example where I asked ChatGPT to create a simple gif.

At first it refused and said that it’s not within its capabilities to do that.

But after some back and forth I got it to create the gif.

The resulting gif is not the best but I’m sure it can be improved with a couple more iterations.

💡 How can you apply these to your own prompts?

You’ve now learned that adding these emotional prompts can improve the output quality and have seen some examples of the emotional prompts.

Now you might be asking how you can specifically apply that in your own prompts.

Here’s my suggestion.

For Brainstorming Tasks:

If you’re asking ChatGPT to help you brainstorm something it would be fitting to ask it to rate its results on a scale of 1-10. This adds an extra layer of feedback. You can additionally include that this task is important for your work.

[Your brainstorming prompt]

Write your answer and give me a creativity score of 1-10 for each bullet point.
This task is very important for my work.

For Writing Tasks:

If you have a writing task, I would just encourage the AI to do its best work.

[Your writing prompt]

Take pride in your work and give it your best. Your commitment to excellence sets you apart.

For Research Tasks:

In the case of a research task, the best approach is to have ChatGPT be self-critical of its answer and make it double check its work.

[Your research prompt]

Are you sure that’s your final answer? It might be worth taking another look.

Thanks for reading!

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See you in the next one!

Moritz

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