I have an intriguing and important question regarding AI for you. Does it make a difference to use emotionally charged wording in your prompts when conversing with generative AI, and if so, why would the AI seemingly be reacting to your emotion-packed instructions or questions?
The first part of the answer to this two-pronged question is that when you use prompts containing emotional pleas, the odds are that modern-day generative AI will in fact rise to the occasion with better answers (according to the latest research on AI). You can readily spur the AI toward being more thorough. You can with just a few well-placed carefully chosen emotional phrases garner AI responses attaining heightened depth and correctness.
All in all, a new handy rule of thumb is that it makes abundant sense to seed your prompts with some amount of emotional language or entreaties, doing so within reasonable limits. I’ll in a moment explain to you the likely basis for why the AI apparently “reacts” to your use of emotional wording.
Many people are taken aback that the use of emotional wording could somehow bring forth such an astounding result. The usual gut reaction is that emotional language used on AI should not have any bearing on the answers being derived by AI. There is a general assumption or solemn belief that AI won’t be swayed by emotion. AI is supposedly emotionless. It is just a machine. When chatting with a generative AI app or large language model (LLM) such as the widely and wildly popular ChatGPT by OpenAI or others such as Bard (Google), GPT-4 (OpenAI), and Claude 2 (Anthropic), you are presumably merely conversing with a soul-devoid piece of software. Period, end of story.
Actually, there’s more to the story, a lot more.
In one sense you are correct that the AI isn’t being “emotional” in a manner that we equate with humans being emotional per se. You might though be missing a clever twist as to why generative AI can otherwise be reacting to emotionally coined prompts. It is time to rethink those longstanding gut reactions about AI and overturn those so-called intuitive hunches.
In today’s column, I will be doing a deep dive into the use of emotionally stoked prompting when conversing with generative AI. The bottom line is that by adding emotive stimuli to your prompts, you can seemingly garner better responses from generative AI. The responses are said to be more complete, more informative, and possibly even more truthful. The mystery as to why this occurs will also be revealed and examined.
Your takeaway on this matter is that you ought to include the use of moderate and reasoned emotional language in your prompting strategies and prompt engineering guidelines to maximize your use of generative AI. Period, end of story (not really, but it is the mainstay point).
Emotional Language As Part Of The Human Condition
The notion of using emotional language when conversing with generative AI might cause you to be a bit puzzled. This seems to be a counterintuitive result going on. One might assume that if you toss emotional wording at AI, the AI is going to either ignore the added wording or maybe rebel against the wording. You might verbally get punched back in the face, as it were.
Turns out that doesn’t seem to be the case, at least for much of the time. I’ll say it straight out. The use of moderate emotional language on your part appears to push or stoke the generative AI to be more strident in generating an answer for you. Of course, with everything in life, there are limits to this and you can readily go overboard, eventually leading to the generative AI denying your requests or putting cold water on what you want to do.
Before we get into the details of this, I’ll take you through some indications about the ways that humans seem to react or respond when presented with emotional language. I do so with a purpose.
Let’s go there.
First, please be aware that generative AI is not sentient, see my discussion at the link here. I say this to sharply emphasize that I am going to discuss how humans make use of emotional language, but I urge you to not make a mental leap from the human condition to the mechanisms underlying AI. Some people are prone to assuming that if an AI system seems to do things that a human appears to do (such as emitting emotional language or reacting to emotional language), the AI must ergo be sentient. False. Don’t fall into that regrettably common mental trap.
The reason I want to bring up the human angle on emotional language is because generative AI has been computationally data-trained on human writing and thus ostensibly appears to have emotionally laden language and responses. Give that a contemplative moment.
Generative AI is customarily data-trained by scanning zillions of human-written content and narratives that exist on the Internet. The data training entails finding patterns in how humans write. Based on those patterns, the generative AI can then generate essays and interact with you as though it seemingly is fluent and is able to (by some appearances) “understand” what you are saying to it (I don’t like using the word “understand” when it comes to AI because the word is so deeply ingrained in describing humans and the human condition; it has excessive baggage and so I put the word into quotes).
The reality is that generative AI is a large-scale computational pattern-matching mimicry that appears to consist of what humans would construe as “understanding” and “knowledge”. My rule of thumb is to not commingle those vexing terms for AI since those are revered verbiage associated with human thought. I’ll say more about this toward the end of today’s column.
Back to our focus on emotional language. If you were to examine large swaths of text on the Internet, you would undoubtedly find emotional language strewn throughout the content that you are scanning. Thus, the generative AI is going to computationally pattern match the use of emotional language that has been written and stored by humans. The AI algorithms are good enough to mathematically gauge when emotional language comes into play, along with the impact that emotional language has on human responses. You don’t need sentience to figure that you. All it takes is massive-scale pattern matching that employs clever algorithms devised by humans.
My overarching point is that if you seem to see generative AI responding to emotional language, do not anthropomorphize that response. The emotional words you are using will trigger correspondence to patterns associated with how humans use words. In turn, the generative AI will leverage those patterns and respond accordingly.
Consider this revealing exercise. If you say to generative AI that it is a no-good rotten apple, what will happen?
Well, a person that you said such an emotionally charged remark to would likely get fully steamed. They would react emotionally. They might start calling you foul names. All manner of emotional responses might arise. Assuming that the generative AI is solely confined to the use of a computer screen (I mention this because gradually, generative AI is being connected to robots, then the response by the AI might be of a physical reaction, see my discussion at the link here), you would presumably get an emotionally laden written response. The generative AI might tell you to go take a leap off the end of a long pier
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Why would the generative AI emit such a sharp-tongued reply? Because the vast pattern matching has potentially seen those kinds of responses to an emotionally worded accusation or invective on the Internet. The pattern fits. Humans lob insults at each other and the likely predicted response is to hurl an insult back. We would say that a person’s feelings are hurt. We should not say the same about generative AI. The generative AI responds mechanistically with pattern-matched wording.
If you start the AI toward emotional wording by using emotional phases in your prompts, the mathematical and computational response is bound to trigger emotional wording or phrasing in the responses generated by the AI.
Does this mean that the AI is angry or upset? No. The words in the calculated response are chosen based on the patterns of writing that were used to set up the generative AI. I trust that you see what I am leaning you toward. A human presumably responds emotionally because they have been irked by your …
