196

keep in mind also that gpt-3.5 and beyond is instruction-trained, so if you give it a task, even implied, it will really want to accomplish that task, unless that goes against some other training. by asking "what is Michael Jackson up to today" you're putting an expectation on it to produce a correct answer, or as close to as it can manage, hence the attempt to go into recent developments or posthumous releases. it's trying to be useful even in situations when it cannot provide anything of value.

this is a bit more important when you're doing prompt engineering, because if you give it two options, one to actually answer a question and one to indicate that it cannot answer under these circumstances, it will have a strong bias against the latter option. if you ask it to improve a sentence or say it's already perfect, for example, it will have a clear aversion to saying it's already perfect. you should usually just ask it to do the task unconditionally, then run a second pass to choose between the two options, because in those cases the text suggests that some task has been accomplished.