Flattery, Bribes, and Threats Don't Really Make LLMs Better

Original Reddit post

Ran an experiment with 200 tasks to test whether psychological framing (encouragement, threats, tips) actually improves AI outputs. Turns out simple, clear prompts consistently outperformed every other approach across both GPT-5.2 and Claude Sonnet 4.5. The takeaway: skip the motivational pep talks and just be specific about what you want. submitted by /u/kwk236

Originally posted by u/kwk236 on r/ArtificialInteligence