A habit I noticed one morning
I had given a caption bot for our card-news posts just one example sentence. Its first line kept opening the same way as the example. To check whether that was a coincidence, I ran a small experiment.
How I tested
Same topic, only the conditions changed, 10 generations each. If the first line reused the example's pattern, I counted it as a 「copy」.
| Condition | Copies |
|---|---|
| 1 example | 7 |
| 3 examples | 3 |
| 3 examples + one warning line | 1 |
Adding examples clearly helped, but the final warning line produced the biggest drop.
Try it yourself
1. Prepare 3 examples. Deliberately vary their length and first word.
2. Put a label that says 「Examples」 above the block.
3. Add one warning line below it.
[Examples]
1) One tip worth saving today.
2) The setting that failed yesterday, fixed like this.
3) Three lines are enough.
These examples are for tone reference only. Do not reuse the sentence structure or the first word.
Takeaway
Tell the bot directly that examples are a tool for showing tone, not a original to copy.
To a bot, a single example looks like 「the right answer」. Give several, state their purpose in one line, and the same bot writes with much more variety. A non-developer can copy and paste these instructions and try it today.