Stop telling AI it's an expert programmer, you're making it worse at its job new research shows the best results need specific prompts

Date:
Tue, 24 Mar 2026 16:30:00 +0000

Description:
Stop telling AI how it should generate answers focus more on asking what you want of it, and giving it the necessary context.

FULL STORY ======================================================================Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Threads Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Tech Radar Pro Are you a pro? Subscribe to our newsletter Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed! Contact me with news
and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over. You are now subscribed Your newsletter sign-up was successful An account already exists for this email address, please log in. Subscribe to our newsletter Telling AI it's an expert in something is causing it to go down a totally different
route By introducing a persona, AI might not be able to think for itself, reducing output quality The best prompts explain the task to AI and give it all the context and tools it needs New research has claimed asking AI to 'act as an expert' doesn't actually improve result reliability despite being a widely used prompt enhancer.

More specifically, it might help with alignment-style tasks such as writing, tone and structure guidance, but it likely hurts knowledge tasks like maths and coding. Per the data these so-called expert personas underperformance
base models on benchmarks likely because they're triggering the AI to shift into instruction-following mode rather than fact recall. Article continues below You may like How to write effective prompts for AI website builders ChatGPT improves when you ask twice or more This trick will have ChatGPT and Gemini get straight to the point Stop over-engineering your AI prompts "We specifically discourage crafting (system) prompt for maximum performance by exploiting biases, as this may have unexpected side effects, reinforce societal biases and poison training data obtained with such prompts," the paper, written by researchers affiliated with the University of Southern California (USC) reads.

Separate research along the same lines found that while persona prompting can help shape tone and style, it does nothing to add factual capability to a model.

Instead, prompt length and accuracy matters. A comprehensively designed
prompt will ultimately give AI as much context as it needs to act
autonomously and generate higher-quality output.

The paper introduces a new PRISM (Persona Routing via Intent-based Self-Modeling) solution, whereby AI generates answers with and without a persona and compares which answer is best. The AI then learned when to apply personas in the future, falling back on the base model's functionality when personas hurt output quality. Are you a pro? Subscribe to our newsletter Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed! Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over.

Adding to the complexity of prompt engineering, the researchers also uncover differences in model types, noting that reasoning models benefit more from context length while instruction-tuned models can be most sensitive to personas.

In short, it seems that model developers are doing all the work needed to ensure generative AI gives us the best output, and that we should only aim to give chatbots tasks and share relevant context without dictating how they should go about creating a response. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!

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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/pro/stop-telling-ai-its-an-expert-programmer-youre-m aking-it-worse-at-its-job-new-research-shows-the-best-results-need-specific-pr ompts


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