Claims

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 · design r2 · 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

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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