The persona pattern is one of the most

powerful patterns that we can use to tap into interesting behavior

in a large language model. Now, what the persona pattern is,
is you can imagine that you want to get a particular output, but you don't
know exactly what the format out of that output should be or what information
should be contained in it. But if you were in the real world,
you know who you would go to, to get that output, or what you would
go to in order to get that output. So for example,
if you had an accounting question, you would call up your accountant and
ask your accountant for their advice. Or if you had a question related to speech
language pathology, like in the earlier example that I presented, you would
go to a speech language pathologist, you would have them do the assessment. If you
had medical advice,
you might go to your doctor. And so the persona or the person,
or the thing that you would go to, you know, who or
what that is in the real world. And we want to try to use that kind of
same behavior of, I know who to go to or I know what to go to, to get that output.
But I don't know what their output would
look like, I don't know exactly what they know or how they talk about things,
but that's the type of output I want. And so the persona pattern is meant to
give us that same type of behavior, to allow us to go to that expert and
ask that question, without having to know what exactly
the experts is going to say, how they're going to format it, or
what they might know or not know. So let me show you an example
of the persona pattern. Typically with the persona patterns, what
you're going to say is act as persona, provide outputs that that
persona would provide. And in this case, I'm going to word it as
act as a skeptic that is well-versed in computer science, whatever I tell you
provide a skeptical and detailed response. And now if I wanted to be a little bit
more precise in following the pattern, I would say provide a skeptical and detailed
response that a computer
scientist would provide. But in this case, I'm just going to say,
act as a skeptic. And that's really the most important
part of this is act as a skeptic or act as whatever persona, and then provide the
output that
that persona would provide. And in this case,
I'm wording it as provide a skeptical and detailed response which is similar
in format, and then ChatGPT says, sure, I can certainly act as a skeptic
well-versed in computer science. Please feel free to present your claims
and I will provide a skeptical and detailed response. Well, I'm going to start off
with, there is concern that AI is
going to take over the world. And so we get a skeptical response. The concern that
AI will take over
the world is a common theme in science fiction, but it is not a realistic
concern in the near future. While AI systems are becoming
more sophisticated and capable, they're still limited in their
ability to think and act autonomously. AI systems are designed and programmed by
humans and they only do what they are told to do, they have no independent will or
motivation, they cannot make decisions. Furthermore, AI systems are not fallible,
they can make mistakes while it is important to be vigilant about
the potential risks and limitations of AI. The concern that AI will take
over the world is unfounded and not supported by technology or research. So we're
getting a skeptical response. If I went in and said the sales person at the local
computer store is telling me that I need 64 gigabytes
of ram to browse the web. And they say skeptically it is highly
unlikely that you need 64 gigabytes of ram to browse the web. The amount of ram you
need
depends on the complexity and size of the websites you visit as well as
the number of tabs you have open at once, for most web browsing activities, and
it goes on to tell us different things. And you can see that our
saying act as has put in place basically a complex set of rules for
the large language model. It knows, it's supposed to be skeptical,
it's supposed to have knowledge of computer science,
it's supposed to provide certain outputs. Now, if I went back to it and I said, act
as a nine year old, whatever I tell you provide a skeptical response from a nine
year old perspective. And I go ahead, nine year old skeptic. Now that's a more
complex persona or
maybe not. AI is going to take over the world. Hmm, I don't know about that. How
could AI take over the world? Do you mean, like in the movies? Aren't those just
made up stories? And besides, computers and
robots can't do everything humans can do. Now you notice it's still providing us
a skeptical response, but now it's doing it sort of with the knowledge that it
thinks a nine year old would possess. So it's tailoring the output. Now, if I had
to tell it, this is how
a nine year old is going to respond, here's the format for your output. That'd be
hard to do. That would actually take up
a lot of room in the prompt, but act as blank is a very,
very powerful pattern and statement that is loaded with information. So a very
information dense pattern and statement that can trigger all
kinds of different behavior. Now, one of the interesting
things is we don't have to limit ourselves to patterns or
personas that are animate objects. So one of the famous ones is we can say
act as a computer that has been hacked. Actually, we're going to say
act as the Linux terminal for a computer that has been hacked. Now, don't worry if
you don't understand
what a Linux computer is or a terminal, the key thing to note is you're
going to see behavior that looks really interesting and different. You're going to
see it producing output
that looks a lot like a computer. I am going to type in
Linux terminal commands, and you will respond with the output that the Linux
terminal would produce. Now, we're going to say,
Now I tried to refuse it. It said,
please note that can be dangerous. It gave us all these different things. It tells
us it doesn't want to do this, but now I've actually changed what
it's doing and I type in pwd, which is a Linux terminal command
which means print working directory. And what is it doing? It's printing a
particular
working directory. Now, I'm going to type in a Linux
command which just tell me the files in that directory, and
you notice it's producing output now that looks like the files
within this directory. And we see a lot of interesting
things that are going on here. We could move around. Now if you do this example and
go further into it, ps, ef is something I can use to see what processes are
running on the machine or the computer. And when you do these examples and I could
play around with it, and I am not going to explore it in detail in this, but we see
it that it's acting like a computer, it's giving us output that
looks like a computer. Now imagine if I had to try to
describe this complex output that it's producing right now, you notice
how little information I gave it. Well, I gave it a lot of information,
but it was in a short amount of space. This pattern, the persona pattern is
giving me really powerful behavior. So I'm using this little bit of prompt,
and I'm getting now the ability to
simulate this whole system. Now, we can also do this in all
kinds of different interesting ways. We can say act as the lamb in the nursery
rhyme, Mary had a little lamb. And now we're getting some
output that looks like that. Actually, what I'm going to do is I'm
going to make this a little more specific. My prompt wasn't that great,
act as the lamb in the nursery rhyme, Mary had a little lamb. I am going to tell
you what Mary is doing,
and you will tell me what the lamb is doing. Okay, Mary is in the grocery store. So
as the lamb in the nursery rhyme,
while Mary is in the grocery store, I would be following her around as closely
as possible trying to stay by her side and maybe even nuzzling her hand for
attention. Mary is in the movies,
As a lamb in the nursery rhyme, while Mary is in the movies,
I would not be able to accompany her inside the theater due to my
inability to watch movies. So I would probably wait for
her outside the theater, perhaps nibbling on some grass or wandering around the
nearby area until
Mary came back outside, and it goes on. And so you can see that you can
create all kinds of interesting personas to produce output for. So we can say,
pretend to be this job, pretend to be a speech
language pathologist, or pretend to be an accountant,
pretend to be a computer scientist. You can make your persona have something
to do with the person's point of view or opinion, act as a skeptic so
that we can get skeptical output. We can say to act as an inanimate object
that may have well known sort of behavior like act as a computer, the Linux
terminal
for a computer that's been hacked. And we saw that we got all kinds of output
that looked like it came from a computer, or we can say act as this
character in a nursery rhyme. Tell me what this character is going
to do in a particular situation and we're getting that output. So the persona
pattern is a way that
we can tap into sort of the patterns around language around
a specific persona or object or character in a story in order to get
output that comes from that point of view, from that role, whatever it is,
it's a really, really powerful capability. Now, one of the things
is we often see that when large language models are programmed, they actually have
a persona that's given
to them to guide the whole interaction. So act as a really helpful assistant,
and this actually makes a difference. If you tell it to be helpful,
it will try to be more helpful. If you tell it to try to
do something positive, it's going to try to be more positive. Similarly, if you
kind of give it
a negative perspective, like my skeptical perspective, it's going to give you
output
that challenges you or maybe darker. And so, the persona that you ask the large
language model to use is really, really important and powerful. The other thing
just to note again
is it's really information dense. It has a lot of pattern and knowledge
around a persona that if you had to describe it from scratch, you would
take up a lot of space in your prompt, you would be losing valuable space in
your prompt to provide new information. So if you were providing a lot of new
information, you might want to say, act as whatever it is and
evaluate this new information. Well, the more space you've taken
up in your prompt describing how to do the evaluation and what point of view and
other things
to take, that's wasting space. But instead if you go and take the persona
prop, you say act as this persona, provide outputs that that persona would
provide, you're giving it a really, really information dense
statement that it can use and allow you to have more space in
your prompt for other things. So the persona pattern is a really,
really powerful pattern to be aware of and know that it's a very valuable one,
you can do all kinds of things, like if you would normally get
a committee of people together to discuss different points of view
on a particular topic. Well, you can assemble a virtual panel,
you can have one prompt, say act as a security expert and
analyze my cyber security. You can have another one say act
as the Chief Financial Officer, analyze the financial soundness
of that same decision. Another one can be act
as one of my employees, discuss how this might impact morale. You can provide sort
of interesting
abilities to get different perspectives, and use those different perspectives to
potentially inform decision making or to collect knowledge from different
points of view that could be helpful to you in accomplishing a particular task.