Small tweaks to AI prompts can have significant impacts on output

Marketplace All-in-One

Marketplace

News, Business

4.8 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 30 July 2025

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino speaks to Sayash Kapoor, a PhD candidate at Princeton and co-author of “AI Snake Oil." He says small tweaks to AI chatbots can often have big, unpredictable effects.

Transcript

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0:53.2	Go to Shopify.com.uk slash try.com.uk.uk slash try. Go to Shopify.com.uk slash try. Shopify.com.uker slash try. Want to tweak your chatbot's personality? Be careful what you wish for. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carrino.
1:26.2	A lot of factors can affect how a chatbot behaves or misbehaves. There's the data a model was trained on, which often includes a lot of unsavory stuff
1:29.5	on the internet. There's reinforcement learning when humans give feedback on what's appropriate
1:34.9	or helpful. And then there are system prompts. Instructions engineers give a model, often once
1:41.6	it's already being used out in the world. But small tweaks can often
1:45.9	have big, unpredictable effects, says Sayyash Kapoor. He's a PhD candidate at Princeton and the author
1:53.0	of AI Snake Oil, which is both a book and a substack by the same name. The easiest way to change
1:59.6	the model's behavior is simply to edit the system prompt.
2:03.5	So for example, a developer can realize that their model is behaving in a certain way,
2:08.4	and they simply need to change a few lines of instruction written in plain English or plain natural
	...

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