This Sentence Improves LLMs — “This Is Important to My Career”

Yes, research shows LLMs really do work better when you do this. Here’s why you should add “this is important to my career” and other emotional stimuli to your LLM prompts for better results.

LLM research is starting to show the importance of using certain key phrases to get the LLM to produce better results. (Photo by Point Normal for Unsplash+. Unsplash+ license, used with permission.)

LLMs don’t actually need feelings for certain emotional stimuli to measurably improve their performance.

No, seriously, that’s what the research shows!

Here’s what you need to know about why it works and how to apply these principles to improve LLM performance for your own work.

Paper: “LLMs Understand & Can Be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli”

According to one of the more influential LLM papers of 2023 by Cheng Li and collaborators, using an “EmotionPrompt” significantly boosts performance. (The link to the source paper is at the end of the article.)

EmotionPrompt significantly boosts the performance of generative tasks (10.9% average improvement in terms of performance, truthfulness, and responsibility metrics).

Yes, I know that sounds absurd. But I promise I’ll return to the “why” this works this way later. So let’s focus on the…