I can't prevent gpt 3.5 from using certain words

Prompting
1

Hello everyone,
so I’ve struggling with this for some long hours by now:

There is a list of words I don’t want gpt to use in its output and it doesn’t matter how I state this in the prompt, it keeps using them.

I’ve tried things like:
“Do not use the following words: [“banana”, “apple”]”.
Then I learned gpt isn’t very good with negative requests… then I tried:
“Refrain from using the following words: “apple”, “banana””

… It didn’t help, it keeps including the forbidden words.

Anyone has a similar issue? Anyone knows how to solve it? Thanks!

2

Assuming you are using the api, Did you put it in the prompt or system command. Sadly 3.5 does not pay as much attention to instructions as 4 - my advice is to capture the output programmatically and if it contains your words, feed back and ask ti amend. I did a quick test just now and that seems to solve it for you

3

Unfortunately, there is such an issue in 3.5. I experienced a similar problem, but I solved it with GPT-4.

1 Like