this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
2057 points (99.4% liked)
Programmer Humor
23635 readers
1032 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
ChatGPT went through a phase of overly bubbly upbeat responses, they chilled it out tho. Not sure if that’s what you saw.
One thing is for sure with all of them, they never say “I don’t know” because such responses aren’t likely to be found in any training data!
It’s probably part of some system level prompt guidance too, like you say, to be confident.
I think "I don't know" might sometimes be found in the training data. But, I'm sure they optimize the meta-prompts so that it never shows up in a response to people. While it might be the "honest" answer a lot of the time, the makers of these LLMs seem to believe that people would prefer confident bullshit that's wrong over "I don't know".