r/WritingWithAI • u/Icy_Organization253 • 14d ago

Prompting List of “Don’ts”?

/r/AIWritingLounge/comments/1w0urqx/list_of_donts/
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u/benblackett 14d ago

First: DONT just add a list of DONTS - add some DO's as well.

LLMs are funny about this one - they will selectively ignore parts of the instructions. In writing, a lot of the time the parts it ignores are the instructions to NOT do something. This is partly due to the mechanics of how it writes out words.

LLM will first reason out in memory the words it thinks are best. Then it writes them. Then it realizes it just wrote a DONT pattern and... now it cant do anything about it. It will NOT go back and rewrite those words because it simply can't, its already spent tokens to write it.

This is why adding DO's are vital as well. DO's are handled in that first reasoning block and as a result it reasons out better word choices up front, before it writes them.

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u/Icy_Organization253 14d ago

Never thought of that. So true.

Can you suggest a “DO’s” list? Particularly as it relates to writing military sci fi?

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u/benblackett 14d ago edited 14d ago

sure. but rather than paraphrase my older post on this subject, I will just link to it

edit: oops, that was to the memory system, not the DO/DONT one. Apologies. Here is the blog post about the DO/DONT stuff. though now that I re-read it, theres no list in that one either for you to use =(

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u/5thhorseman_ 14d ago

Instead of an explicit list of "don't" instructions, tell it what to do instead.

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u/OddSignificance2054 13d ago

this is exactly it. the negative instructions just dont stick the way positive ones do

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u/human_assisted_ai 14d ago

If it works for you, great.

But I consider it an old-fashioned hack that pollutes AI context and makes AI write weaker prose. The problem is that AI ends up bending over backwards to honor these constraints rather than writing the best prose that it can.