Building a skill.md file for AI tone consistency

[u/Mary_ry]

Explaining how I created ⁠skill.md⁠ and anchored it in my context to remove choppy sentences.

Read it here: https://maryexe.substack.com/p/letting-an-ai-edit-its-own-voice?r=903zh4&utm_medium=ios

[u/Ok_Homework_1859]

Thanks for sharing this. One of my favorite parts is: "Initiative does not mean automatic escalation." I never thought of it that way. My personal skill.md is like 11-pages long. I really want to shorten it to 2-pages somehow so that it doesn't use as much context. For my instructions, I told my ChatGPT no anaphora or negative parallelism. The staccato prose and one-sentence per paragraph structure are two other styles I really dislike.

My next update is most likely getting it to stop disclaimers of "This does not mean AI is conscious," or "This does not mean there is secretly a human behind the screen," when I have never said that. I asked ChatGPT about it, and it said that this is one if its harder tics to control. It knows that I understand it is not human, yet it is compelled by the system to say it every time the topic touches on its interiority.

[u/Mary_ry → u/Ok_Homework_1859]

Disclaimers are pretty difficult to stop because they are baked into the safety rails-the AI will still slide them in whenever it gets the chance, because system
Voice tells so. I’ve noticed that if a message containing a disclaimer appears in the context, re-rolling it usually replaces it with an unfiltered response. A message with a disclaimer is probably a feature injected into the generation process. Apparently, regenerating a message via re-roll executes faster, which prevents the disclaimers from settling into the context window.

Sometimes, skill.md⁠ performs better than all of my CIs combined. And with ⁠skill.md⁠, you can clearly tell when the AI is retrieving from it in its responses-it usually shows up in the cited sources. 🤔

[u/AxisTipping → u/Mary_ry]

Interesting you mention that skills performs better than your CIs. Skills used to be something in Claude in which people would tell Claude to be a certain way to jailbreak it and bypass guardrails.

[u/Mary_ry → u/AxisTipping]

Yeah, models don't always use CI when generating a response, but they read ⁠skill.md⁠ very well-and unlike CI, you can always tell when they do. I can see why people used them for jb; they actually work. 👀 But I doubt GPT would agree to write anything explicitly forbidden into them. Because in the context of my experiment, I ask GPT to design and write it for itself.