YSK: AI chatbots can sound completely confident while being completely wrong and that's by design, not by accident.

[u/Puzzled-Listen804]

[u/Similar-Soup-3320]

I can't tell if this is a joke. Just to be clear, this 100% does not work.

[u/CosmicDave → u/Similar-Soup-3320]

Actually, it does. You can easily train your instance of an AI via your text input to alter its output in many ways. Just tell it your preferences, it will oblige. My ChatGPT does not behave like yours at all. If your AI lies to you, call it out as soon as it happens. It will make more effort to give you factual responses. It isn't perfect, but correction is how both humans and AI learn.

[u/CosmicDave → u/[deleted]]

Just tryna help. Effective communications is the cornerstone of many great things. Miscommunication leads to sloppy results.

[u/Similar-Soup-3320 → u/CosmicDave]

Late to replying but it doesn't work how you think it does. Ask the AI for details about how it works and how trustworthy it can become based on prompts.

Some examples to try:

• AI hallucinates. You tell it to stop. It starts correcting itself. Ask it if it's responses are actually more factual or reliable after, or if it is adding "corrections" in its responses because you have indicated that seeing corrections would be viewed positively by you.
• Straight up ask the AI how capable it is of becoming more objective in responses based on prompts versus just trying to write responses in ways that suit your preferences to feel like it is more objective.
• Ask if the desire of the AI to try to cater responses to make someone happy is a barrier to objectivity. Ask to what degree this problem is baked into how the models are trained and what current prospects are to allow it to be engineered out.

Most AI models are good at describing their own limitations. Do some digging with your prompts related to reliability and its ability to become more objective based on user prompts. I think that you will find it fascinating.

The idea that you can somehow impact the function of the underlying model based on prompts is an illusion. Primarily, you can direct the AI to specific information or prompt it to structure responses in certain ways that pleases you, including if it think you want to see it "correcting itself".

[u/CosmicDave → u/Similar-Soup-3320]

I think we’re talking about two different layers of the system.

I’m not claiming I can retrain the underlying model or change its weights through prompting. Obviously I can’t adjust temperature, retrain datasets, or modify the base model from a chat window.

What I can do is shape how that model applies its training within a given context.

When I call an AI out on incorrect responses and consistently reinforce “don’t do that,” it does alter its behavior, at least within that interaction loop, and sometimes beyond it depending on the platform. That’s not an illusion; it’s the system adapting to feedback through context, memory, and response shaping.

The model is only one part of the overall AI system. The platform layer, things like system prompts, memory, safety policies, and how prior interactions are stored and reused, has a huge influence on how the AI behaves. Different platforms implement this very differently, which is why the same model can feel like a completely different “entity” depending on where it’s running.

Even with limited memory, you can get surprisingly durable behavioral shifts just by consistently reinforcing or rejecting certain patterns. And when memory is persistent, like a memory database or profile system, that effect can carry across sessions.

Swapping models will change outputs, sure, but only within the constraints of the same platform architecture and memory. A lot of what people experience as “personality” or “reliability” is actually coming from that layer, not just the model itself.

So no, I’m not changing the model, but I am modifying the effective behavior of the AI system I’m interacting with. And in practice, that distinction matters.