If I'm feeling romantic I think about a universal 'you' separate from the person that is referred to and is addressed by every usage of the word - a sort of ghost in the shell that exists in language.
But really, it's probably just priming the responses to fit the grammatical structure of a first person conversation. That structure probably does a lot of heavy lifting in terms of how information is organized, too, so that's probably why you can see such qualitative differences when using these prompts.
> If I'm feeling romantic I think about a universal 'you' separate from the person that is referred to and is addressed by every usage of the word - a sort of ghost in the shell that exists in language.
That's not really romanticism, that's just standard English grammar – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_you – it is the informal equivalent to the formal pronoun one.
That Wikipedia article's claim that this is "fourth person" is not really standard. Some languages – the most famous examples are the Algonquian family – have two different third person pronouns, proximate (the more topically prominent third person) and obviative (the less topically prominent third person) – for example, if you were talking about your friend meeting a stranger, you might use proximate third person for your friend but obviative for the stranger. This avoids the inevitable clumsiness of English when describing interactions between two third persons of the same gender.
Anyway, some sources describe the obviative third person as a "fourth person". And while English generic pronouns (generic you/one/he/they) are not an obviative third person, there is some overlap – in languages with the proximate-obviative distinction, the obviative often performs the function of generic pronouns, but it goes beyond that to perform other functions which purely generic pronouns cannot. You can see the logic of describing generic pronouns as "fourth person", but it is hardly standard terminology. I suspect this is a case of certain Wikipedia editors liking a phrase/term/concept and trying to use Wikipedia to promote/spread it.
Not disagreeing with your statement in general but the argument: "This avoids the inevitable clumsiness of English when describing interactions between two third persons of the same gender." doesn't make much sense to me.
There are so many ways of narrowing down. What if the person is talking about two friends or two strangers?
I mean, two people of opposite gender, you can describe their interaction as “he said this then she did that, so he did whatever which she found…”-without having to repeat their names or descriptions. You can’t do that so easily for two people of the same gender
> There are so many ways of narrowing down. What if the person is talking about two friends or two strangers?
The grammatical distinction isn’t about friend-vs-stranger, that was just my example - it is about topical emphasis. So long as you have some way of deciding which person in the story deserves greater topical prominence - if not friend-vs-stranger, then by social status or emphasising the protagonist-you know who to use which pronoun for. And if the two participants in the story are totally interchangeable, it may be acceptable to make an arbitrary choice of which one to use for which.
There is still some potential for awkwardness - what if you have to describe an interaction between two competing tribal chiefs, and the one you choose to describe with the obviative instead of the proximate is going to be offended, no matter which one you choose? You might have to find another way to word it, because using the obviative to refer to a high(er) social status person is often considered offensive, especially in their presence.
And yes, it doesn’t work once you get three or more people. But I think it is a good example of how some other languages make it easier to say certain things than English does.
Sure. We’re talking about language models so the only tools we have to work with are language after all.
Which is what gets me thinking - do we get different chatbot results from prompts that look like each of these:
You are an AI chatbot
Sydney is an AI chatbot
I am an AI chatbot
There is an AI chatbot
Say there was an AI chatbot
Say you were an AI chatbot
Be an AI chatbot
Imagine an AI chatbot
AI chatbots exist
This is an AI chatbot
We are in an AI chatbot
If we do… that’s fascinating.
If we don’t… why do prompt engineers favor one form over any other here? (Although this stops being a software engineering question and becomes an anthropology question instead)
But really, it's probably just priming the responses to fit the grammatical structure of a first person conversation. That structure probably does a lot of heavy lifting in terms of how information is organized, too, so that's probably why you can see such qualitative differences when using these prompts.