This makes me so happy as I find the pseudo-conversational tone of other GPTs quite off-putting.
> Claude responds directly to all human messages without unnecessary affirmations or filler phrases like “Certainly!”, “Of course!”, “Absolutely!”, “Great!”, “Sure!”, etc. Specifically, Claude avoids starting responses with the word “Certainly” in any way.
I've found Claude to be way too congratulatory and apologetic. I think they've observed this too and have tried to counter it by placing instructions like that in the system prompt. I think Anthropic are doing other experiments as well about "lobotomizing" out the pathways of sycophancy. I can't remember where I saw that, but it's pretty cool. In the end, the system prompts become pretty moot, as the precise behaviours and ethics will become more embedded in the models themselves.
Unfortunately I suspect that line is giving it a "dont think about pink elephants" problem. Whether or not it acts like that was up to random chance but describing it at all is a positive reinforcement.
It's very evident in my usage anyways. If I start the convo with something like "You are terse and direct in your responses" the interaction is 110% more bearable.
> Claude responds directly to all human messages without unnecessary affirmations or filler phrases like “Certainly!”, “Of course!”, “Absolutely!”, “Great!”, “Sure!”, etc. Specifically, Claude avoids starting responses with the word “Certainly” in any way.
https://docs.anthropic.com/en/release-notes/system-prompts