Why does AI follow my examples instead of my instructions?
Examples are the strongest thing you can put on the desk.
You write: "Use British spelling."
Then you paste three old emails so it can match the style. They were written by an American colleague.
The new email says color, organize and center.
You told it one thing and showed it another. It went with what you showed it.
Made-up example.
Remember how it works: it writes whatever is most likely to come next, given everything on the desk (see "AI isn't looking anything up").
An instruction is one sentence. Three examples are hundreds of words, all pointing the same way. That's a much stronger pattern to continue.
Few-shot prompting: giving the model a few examples of what you want before asking it to do the task. "Shot" just means example. Zero-shot is no examples, few-shot is a handful.
In a study called "Do as I Say, Not as I Do", researchers gave models an instruction, then a series of examples that went against it.
After enough contradicting examples, even the strongest models, Claude Opus included, followed the examples and ignored the instruction.
Examples are so strong that it copies things you didn't mean it to.
AI can't tell which parts of the example are the point and which are just what happened to be there.
Made-up examples.
This doesn't only happen with examples you paste on purpose.
Every earlier reply in the conversation is an example too. If its first three answers were long and formal, the fourth will lean long and formal, even after you ask for "short and casual".
That's another reason a fresh chat can work better than another correction.
Make them agree with your instructions. If you say British spelling, the examples should use British spelling.
Give two or three that are different from each other. Different openings, different lengths, different topics. Then it copies what they share, which is the part you actually care about.
Say what each one is for. "Copy the tone of these. Ignore what they're about."
Before you paste an example, read it as if it were the only instruction. Because it more or less is.
If you have only one example, say which parts matter, or it'll copy all of it.
If answers in a long chat have drifted into a style you don't want, start fresh with a good example instead of arguing with the old ones.