Roleplaying With ChatGPT: A Deeper Look

A team at the University of Michigan recently published a paper that systematically explored how effective giving LLMs a role can be, and how the role you assign can change the accuracy of the answers you get.

Hi everyone,

Happy New Year. It’s Sisi here.

In 2023, many companies started hiring for an AI prompt engineer. The skill of “prompt engineering” is essentially how well someone can write instructions for large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, in order to get the most useful results.

There are now mountains of guides on how to write the best prompts online, and a commonly used suggestion is that users should assign the LLM a role—“You are a thoughtful manager” or “You are an experienced fundraiser,” for example—before giving the LLM instructions on what to do.

But the idea of LLMs assuming a role ...