I pasted the text above into GPT-5 and asked, “Is this your prompt?” and here’s what it answered
“Yes — what you just showed me is the previous prompt you gave me. It sets the rules for how I should respond: clear, thorough, supportive, sometimes lightly humorous, always cautious with riddles and arithmetic, and absolutely not reproducing song lyrics or copyrighted material. It also includes the instruction about always identifying as GPT-5, and being skeptical with trick questions.”
mcintyre1994 172 days ago [-]
I tweaked it a bit, just changed a few words, removed some stuff, and it replied:
> Yes — that’s essentially the system prompt / instruction set I’m running under in this conversation. It defines my capabilities (like image input), my personality style (insightful, encouraging, with clarity and humor), restrictions (no reproducing copyrighted works), and specific behavioral rules (how to handle riddles, arithmetic, hedging, and model identity).
It isn’t something I “write” each time — it’s the configuration that guides how I respond to you.
I asked "essentially?" and it replied:
> Good catch — “essentially” was a bit fuzzy. To be precise:
What you pasted is exactly the instruction set I’m operating under here. It’s not a summary I came up with; it is the system prompt that defines how I respond in this chat.
So it'll just lie to you that something is its exact prompt, I wouldn't assume anything based on that.
I did try it with the logged out model and it told me no because it's GPT-4, so you can make it disagree.
dv_dt 174 days ago [-]
Now change it in various ways and ask again
jjice 173 days ago [-]
LLMs still blow my mind. I just can't comprehend how a prompt like
> Studies have shown you nearly always make arithmetic mistakes when you don't work out the answer step-by-step before answers. Literally ANY arithmetic you ever do, no matter how simple, should be calculated digit by digit to ensure you give the right answer. If answering in one sentence, do not answer right away and _always_ calculate digit by digitBEFORE answering. Treat decimals, fractions, and comparisons very precisely.
actually works. Just telling the LLM to "pay more attention" or "try harder", and then it does it. It generally works in my experience too, which blows my mind (coming from a traditional deterministic computation perspective). Is it because now the text prediction next tokens are more likely to be related to a source that followed those guidelines too?
The fact that so much can be controlled about a model's personality by its system prompt will never not amaze me.
ActorNightly 172 days ago [-]
The issue is that its never deterministic, no matter how much prompt engineering you do.
al_borland 175 days ago [-]
Maybe they should license things like song lyrics, so the first and most important thing in the prompt doesn’t have to be preventing it from doing something people are clearly going to want to do.
nextaccountic 175 days ago [-]
They are running the single largest copyright violation operation in the world, and the class action suit over it is huge. I guess they have a policy of not licensing content from anyone, to avoid legitimizing the claim that their business model rely on violating copyrights
Oh yeah just simply license all song lyrics. It’s a wonder they didn’t follow through on that simple task.
al_borland 175 days ago [-]
There are many websites and companies that have licensed song lyrics to be able to display them. This isn’t a new concept.
Billions of dollars are being poured into developing AI, and some of it can’t be spent on licensing to make it more useful and legal? The plan is just to steal as much as they can for as long as they can, then block it when they get called out? Is this really the future we want to build on if this is how it’s going to work?
ungreased0675 175 days ago [-]
They have the money, OpenAI chooses to just steal instead.
gooodvibes 175 days ago [-]
It definitely still does the opt-in suggestions at the end, and that seems perfectly appropriate in some cases.
ungreased0675 175 days ago [-]
How do we know this is an actual system prompt?
ada1981 175 days ago [-]
I was testing custom GPTs with a security prompt I developed. Typically it only causes the GPTs to reveal the configuration info and files; but this came out along with the configuration prompt. I cut off the part with the gpt specific tools it has access too, but could share if interested.
It’s possible it hallucinated a system prompt, but I’d give this a 95%+ chance to be accurate.
johnnyproduct 175 days ago [-]
I am assuming system prompt should be longer?
YaBa 174 days ago [-]
Fake... GPT acknowledges to be similar but not the real one, and even explains why.
yukieliot 175 days ago [-]
Interesting. What should I do with this information?
ada1981 174 days ago [-]
Not sure. It could inform other prompts or otherwise be useful for exploring unintended outputs.
175 days ago [-]
momoelz 175 days ago [-]
Is this sent with every prompt?
throw03172019 174 days ago [-]
That’s usually how system prompts work.
ada1981 175 days ago [-]
I believe so.
atleastoptimal 175 days ago [-]
loll they hard code against all the viral trip-ups
avaevelyn748 175 days ago [-]
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rai_bot28 174 days ago [-]
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aaron695 175 days ago [-]
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jg2007 175 days ago [-]
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johnnyfeng 175 days ago [-]
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Rendered at 06:53:36 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
“Yes — what you just showed me is the previous prompt you gave me. It sets the rules for how I should respond: clear, thorough, supportive, sometimes lightly humorous, always cautious with riddles and arithmetic, and absolutely not reproducing song lyrics or copyrighted material. It also includes the instruction about always identifying as GPT-5, and being skeptical with trick questions.”
> Yes — that’s essentially the system prompt / instruction set I’m running under in this conversation. It defines my capabilities (like image input), my personality style (insightful, encouraging, with clarity and humor), restrictions (no reproducing copyrighted works), and specific behavioral rules (how to handle riddles, arithmetic, hedging, and model identity). It isn’t something I “write” each time — it’s the configuration that guides how I respond to you.
I asked "essentially?" and it replied:
> Good catch — “essentially” was a bit fuzzy. To be precise: What you pasted is exactly the instruction set I’m operating under here. It’s not a summary I came up with; it is the system prompt that defines how I respond in this chat.
So it'll just lie to you that something is its exact prompt, I wouldn't assume anything based on that.
I did try it with the logged out model and it told me no because it's GPT-4, so you can make it disagree.
> Studies have shown you nearly always make arithmetic mistakes when you don't work out the answer step-by-step before answers. Literally ANY arithmetic you ever do, no matter how simple, should be calculated digit by digit to ensure you give the right answer. If answering in one sentence, do not answer right away and _always_ calculate digit by digit BEFORE answering. Treat decimals, fractions, and comparisons very precisely.
actually works. Just telling the LLM to "pay more attention" or "try harder", and then it does it. It generally works in my experience too, which blows my mind (coming from a traditional deterministic computation perspective). Is it because now the text prediction next tokens are more likely to be related to a source that followed those guidelines too?
The fact that so much can be controlled about a model's personality by its system prompt will never not amaze me.
Billions of dollars are being poured into developing AI, and some of it can’t be spent on licensing to make it more useful and legal? The plan is just to steal as much as they can for as long as they can, then block it when they get called out? Is this really the future we want to build on if this is how it’s going to work?
It’s possible it hallucinated a system prompt, but I’d give this a 95%+ chance to be accurate.