Prompting alone could not keep the gpt-3.5-turbo model on-topic, while the text-davinci-002 engine stayed on-topic in the deployed chatbot¶
Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · designr2·q1
Currency · newest study 2025 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person · recheck by 2028: tool and model accuracy changes quickly
Subclaims¶
Reading the evidence codes
q is the design tier, i the impact, n the sample, and the kind with its r
the rigour judged within that kind: what each code means.
This claim: no standardized effect is recorded in observations/ for it yet, so no benchmark reading is possible.
q1 i? Despite prompt instructions to refuse off-topic questions, gpt-3.5-turbo answered off-topic questions after repeated attempts, so the authors switched to text-davinci-002. → Saniya Vahedian Movahed and Fred Martin 2025
Evidence¶
Saniya Vahedian Movahed and Fred Martin 2025¶
Saniya Vahedian Movahed and Fred Martin. (2025). Ask Me Anything: Exploring children's attitudes toward an age-tailored AI-powered chatbot. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14217 doi:10.48550/arxiv.2502.14217
q1 · i? · design · r2
Design-phase experiments with the ChatGPT API, including varied prompt language, temperature values of 0.2, 0.5, and 0.7, and token settings, showed that "the gpt-3.5-turbo model would answer off-topic questions after repeated attempts"; text-davinci-002 stayed on-topic and was used in the deployed system.
"We discovered that despite our multiple statements to stay on-topic, the gpt-3.5-turbo model would answer off-topic questions after repeated attempts."
Discussion¶
Related Claims¶
- Student-AI conversations under teacher-authored prompts largely stay on the intended task (71% fully on-track; fewer than 1% substantially off-track) — related
- Preference explanations favoring LearnLM more often cite staying on topic, challenging the learner, and not giving away answers — related
- LLM assessment conversations can be derailed off-topic by gaming attempts, and one successful prompt revision was not demonstrated to be replicable — related
- FSM-based evaluation discriminates interactive quality across models, with GPT-5 Mini scoring highest and most tiers significantly separated — related
Page metadata
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
type |
claim |
id |
gpt35-turbo-off-topic-prompting-insufficient |
title |
Prompting alone could not keep the gpt-3.5-turbo model on-topic, while the text-davinci-002 engine stayed on-topic in the deployed chatbot |
description |
Prompting alone could not keep the gpt-3.5-turbo model on-topic, while the text-davinci-002 engine stayed on-topic in the deployed chatbot |
status |
review |
evidence_strength |
weak |
newest_evidence |
2025 |
recheck_by |
2028 |
generated |
by process:wiki-ingest on 2026-10-12 |
trust |
unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content |
sources |
1 — saniya-vahedian-movahed-and-fred-martin-2025 |
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