Finally got GPT to stop hallucinating my data with one weird trick

I was pulling customer records from a CSV into a chat session for a market analysis, and it kept inventing sales figures. Then I tried adding a strict "only use provided data" instruction at the end of every prompt, right before hitting send, and it worked perfectly. Has anyone else found a simple prompt tweak that fixed a major hallucination issue?

2 comments

2 Comments

grace_allen14d ago

My CSV had dates formatted wrong and it kept making up quarterly totals until I added "use the exact numbers from the CSV, do not round or estimate" at the start of every query. That single line cut my error rate down to almost nothing. Now I just paste that boilerplate instruction before each prompt and it stays honest.

seth68314d ago

Yeah, putting the instruction at the end really does the trick for me too.