Want better ChatGPT responses? Try this surprising trick, researchers say

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ZDNET's key takeaways

• A Penn State study tested the use of different tones with AI.
• The study used ChatGPT with GPT-4o in Deep Research mode.
• Rude prompts resulted in greater accuracy over polite ones.

Do you ever insult an AI when it delivers the wrong answer? Turns out that may not be such a bad strategy. A study conducted by Penn State University researchers found that rude prompts triggered better results than polite ones.

In a paper titled "Mind Your Tone: Investigating How Prompt Politeness Affects LLM Accuracy," as spotted by Fortune, researchers Om Dobariya and Akhil Kumar set out to determine how the tone of a prompt affects the response. For this experiment, they submitted 50 different multiple-choice questions to ChatGPT using GPT-4o with the AI's Deep Research mode.

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