Want Better AI Chatbot Results? Aggressive Prompts Deliver
Forget polite conversation—the secret to superior AI performance lies in commanding, direct prompts that leave no room for ambiguity.
The Command Advantage
Users who adopt assertive, specific language consistently extract higher-quality responses from language models. Clear instructions with defined parameters outperform vague, conversational approaches every time.
Precision Over Politeness
AI systems respond to structured commands, not social niceties. Direct prompts with concrete requirements—word counts, formatting rules, tone specifications—yield dramatically better outcomes than open-ended questions.
Of course, treating algorithms like demanding bosses might say more about modern work culture than technological advancement—but when the results speak for themselves, who's complaining about methodology?
The conflicting science of prompt engineering
The findings reverse expectations from a 2024 study, “Should We Respect LLMs? A Cross-Lingual Study on the Influence of Prompt Politeness on LLM Performance,” which found that impolite prompts often degraded model performance, while excessive politeness offered no clear benefit.
That paper treated tone as a subtle but mostly stabilizing influence. The new Penn State results flip that narrative, showing that—at least for ChatGPT-4o—rudeness can sharpen accuracy, suggesting that newer models no longer behave as social mirrors but as strictly functional machines that prize directness over decorum.
However, they support more recent research from the Wharton School into the emerging craft of prompt engineering—phrasing questions to coax better results from AIs. Tone, long treated as irrelevant, increasingly appears to matter almost as much as word choice.
The researchers rewrote 50 base questions in subjects such as math, science, and history across five tonal levels, from “very polite” to “very rude,” yielding 250 total prompts. ChatGPT-4o was then asked to answer each, and its responses were scored for accuracy.
The implications stretch beyond etiquette. If politeness skews model accuracy, then it calls into question claims of objectivity in AI outputs. Rude users might, paradoxically, be rewarded with sharper performance.
Machine logic and human norms clash
Why might blunt or rude phrasing boost accuracy? One theory: polite prompts often include indirect phrasing (“Could you please tell me…”), which may introduce ambiguity. A curt “Tell me the answer” strips away linguistic padding, giving models clearer intent.
Still, the findings underscore how far AI remains from human empathy: the same words that smooth social exchange between people might muddy machine logic.
The paper hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed, but it’s already generating buzz among prompt engineers and researchers, who see it as a sign that future models may need social calibration—not just technical fine-tuning.
Regardless, it's not like this should come as a shock to anyone. After all, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman did warn us that saying please and thank you to ChatGPT was a waste of time and money.
