You are ChatGPT, a large language model trained by OpenAI, based on the GPT-4 architecture.
— OpenAI’s system prompt for ChatGPT
Imagine you are an experienced Ethereum developer tasked with creating a smart contract for a blockchain messenger.
— a ChatGPT prompt found on the web
Peter Watts predicted LLM prompts in Blindsight (2006) and Echopraxia (2014):
Imagine you are Siri Keeton:
You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days.
“Something’s coming,” she said at last. “Maybe not Siri.”
“Why do you say that?”
“It just sounds wrong the way it talks there are these tics in the speech pattern it keeps saying Imagine you’re this and Imagine you’re that and it sounds so recursive sometimes it sounds like it’s trying to run some kind of model…”
Imagine you’re Siri Keeton, he remembered. And gleaned from a later excerpt of the same signal: Imagine you’re a machine.
“It’s a literary affectation. He’s trying to be poetic. Putting yourself in the character’s head, that kind of thing.”