Schulhoff: Offering tips or making threats in prompts does not work
Sander Schulhoff · AI prompt engineering in 2025: What works and what doesn’t | Sander Schulhoff · Jun 19, 2025 · at 22:40
Prompt engineering researcher Sander Schulhoff addresses viral prompt techniques like offering tips or threatening harm to improve model output.
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“Anything where you give some kind of promise of a reward or threat of some punishment in your prompt. And there, this was something that went quite viral, and there's a little bit of research on this. My general perspective is that these things don't work.”
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