ChatGPT cannot count words or produce word-count-limited text

[44freedom44]

you dont understand. read the concept of chain of thoughts. You need to give him examples before asking

[ruby_coder]

@44freedom44

you dont understand. read the concept of chain of thoughts

Why not simply post an example prompt here so we can test it instead of trying to interpret what you are saying (or drive people to your website)?

I tested what you posted and it does not work as you posted.

If you want us to “understand” then please post a fully working example prompt.

[Ozpeter]

Counting words afterwards is not the issue. There’s plenty of ways to do that. It’s more a matter of getting it to generate the number of words requested, with say a 10% allowance either way. Well, if I was requesting this as a feature I’d also ask for it to be possible to specify the margin of error. For instance,

“Write a description for a YouTube video about Trafalgar Square in London, 500 words, 10% more or less”

That gave me 464 words when I tried it. Actually, if my maths is correct, the word count this time is as requested.

“Write a description for a YouTube video about St Martin in the Fields chuch in London, including nearby attractions, 400 words, 10% more or less”

Result - 432 words. Hmmm. Is the clue to getting this to work the specification of margin of error?

[adam49]

Try this-- it worked on Bing Chat, but not sure about ChatGPT.

A space = 1 character. A letter = 1 character. Based on that logic, write a post about ______ in _____ characters or less. That got me right around the number each time.

[ruby_coder]

@adam49

A space = 1 character. A letter = 1 character. Based on that logic, write a post about ______ in _____ characters or less. That got me right around the number each time

Good idea @adam49, but that does not work with all models, including ChatGPT

But it does work with text-davinci-003. Well done!

Test 1

Test 2

Test 3

Thanks for posting your prompt, @adam49

[ruby_coder]

@adam49

Try this-- it worked on Bing Chat, but not sure about ChatGPT

Speaking of this prompt, I just tried this prompt with text-davinci-003:

A space = 1 character. A letter = 1 character. Based on that logic, write a post about the world’s oceans in 2 characters or less

… and got a very cute response, which looks like ocean waves, haha

~~

Made me smile… thanks again @adam49

[darkdevildeath]

@ruby_coder

ChatGPT does not “refuse” anything. These GPT models do not have the ability to make those kinds of decisions, to “accept” or “refuse” to answer.

Anywho, @jd2470 your post is hard to read due to all the spelling errors. You can submit your post to

In this case, for now, wouldn’t it be more appropriate for ChatGPT to warn about this limitation whenever asked to consider these counts?

For example:
Me - “Create fiction under 30 words.”

ChatGPT - “Sorry, I cannot guarantee word count accuracy due to limitations of my internal logic”

[communitystraightup]

I hope its not too late to chime in, but I tested something like:

“A word is a group of letters separated by spaces, or the group of letters that starts or ends a sentence. Please write a 1,000 word article on _____”.

And it seemed to “try” to get as close as possible to the requested word count, but it’s still falling short. I got it from 300 to 700 so I’m fine with that. I did try to increase from 1,000 to 1,200 but it didn’t seem to make a difference.

[jenny.bickford]

This worked! I got fewer words than I asked for but that’s okay. Thank you!