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petesergeant parent
ChatGPT would have used an actual em dash instead of a hyphen
embedding-shape
Add "Always use dash instead of em dash" to the developer/system prompt, and that's never an "issue" anymore. Seems people forget LLMs are really just programmable (sometimes inaccurate) computers. Whatever you can come up with a signal, someone can come up with an instruction to remove.
astrange
That doesn't work, they beat it so hard into ChatGPT it won't always listen to you about it.

You can't stop it from doing the "if you like I can <three different dumb followup ideas>" thing in every reply either.

embedding-shape
> That doesn't work, they beat it so hard into ChatGPT

I don't think you're able to set either the developer or system prompt on ChatGPT, you're gonna have to use the OpenAPI (or something else) to be able to set that. Once you have access to setting text in those, you can better steer how the responses are.

astrange
ChatGPT has personalization settings that you can use to set part of the system prompt. Other chatbots usually have this too.

How much they follow it depends. Sometimes they know you wrote it and sometimes they don't. Claude in particular likes to complain to me its system prompt is poorly written, which it is.

embedding-shape
> ChatGPT has personalization settings that you can use to set part of the system prompt

That's not true, which field do you believe this to be? Because all of the fields I currently see in ChatGPT do have an effect on your conversations, but they're not just raw injections into system/developer prompts, it's something else.

Try using the API with proper system/developer prompts, then copy-paste that exact same thing into ChatGPT's "personalization settings" and try to have the same conversation, and you'll get direct evidence that it isn't actually the system prompts, but they're injected somewhere into the conversation.

oneeyedpigeon
Except for your poor editor who then has to manually replace your hyphens with proper em dashes. Still, if you're already disrespecting your editor enough to feed them AI slop...
embedding-shape
My editor? I don't think it cares what I input into it, it's just a program. As long as I feed it characters it'll happily tick along as always.
jasonjmcghee
The parent comment is referring to a human editor, not a text editor.
embedding-shape
Huge assumption on their side then, isn't the context "humans writing for other humans"? Not sure how "publication editors" entered the conversation nor from where.
oneeyedpigeon
I was referring to a human editor, which I thought was obvious enough from context. I assumed the reply was in jest. My original comment was light-hearted, so I don't think it needs to be rigorously analysed, but plenty of humans write for other humans but still have an editor involved in the process.
Kim_Bruning
They're really not programmable computers! (Bad mental model is bad.)

But yes the current commercial ones are somewhat controllable, much of the time.

embedding-shape
Obviously not, computers are the true programmable computers. But I'd still think it's accurate to say they're like programmable computers that are sometimes inaccurate, for most intents and purposes it's a fine mental model unless you really wanna get into the weeds.
oneeyedpigeon
And many of us human writers would have done so, too, since we've had to learn the—not very obscure—keyboard shortcut to insert an emdash.
NoMoreNicksLeft
I would use an actual em dash if there were a keyboard key for it. On my macbook, I have an an action script set up on the touchbar for emdash and a few other unicodey glyphs, but the (virtual) buttons are like 2 inches wide each so I can't fit more than 5 or 6 across it. Sucks.
gowld
On Mac emdash is option-shift-hypen (aka shift-endash, aka capital endash)

In Menlo font (Chrome on Mac's default monospace font, used for HN comments) em-dash(—) and en-dash (–) use the same glyph, though.

petesergeant OP
Double hyphen works in many places

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