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Has there been an LLM that reliably does not ignore the word "not"?

Because I'm pretty sure that's a regression compared to most prior NLP.



> Has there been an LLM that reliably does not ignore the word "not"?

Curious. I would expect most of them to get that right, unless it's an intentionally tricky question. Do you have an example?


It tends to happen for any prompt that calls for generating a piece of output for which there are many valid answers, but one is highly weighted and you want variety. Do you remember that meme a few years ago where people were asked to generate a color and then a hand tool, and most people immediately responded "erqunzzrebengyrnfgbarbsgubfrgjb"? (rot13+padding for those who haven't done this)

This particular example is too small to regularly trip AIs, but as a general rule I do not consider it tricky to try to textually negative-prompt to remove a commonly-valid-but-not-currently-wanted response. (Obviously, if you manually tweak the weights to forbid something rather than using the word "not", this fails.)

From my very rough observations, for models that fit on a local device, it typically starts to happen maybe 10% of the time when the prompt reaches 300 characters or so (specifying other parts of what you want); bigger models just need a bit more input before they fail. Reasoning models might be better, but we can watch them literally burn power running nonsensical variations through the thought pane so they're far from a sure answer.

This happens in any context you can think of: from scratch or extending an existing work; single or list; information lookup, prose generation, code generation (consider "Extend this web app to do lengthy-description-of-some-task. Remember I am not using React you stupid piece of shit AI!").




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