Asking AI Chatbots to Adopt an Expert Persona Doesn't Work

Conventional wisdom suggests that we should ask AI chatbots to adopt an expert persona to elicit better answers. According to this advice, prompts will yield better responses if they include statements such as "Imagine that you are a world class statistician" or "Think like an expert engineer." Some of the major models (such as Claude and ChatGPT) advise users to engage in this type of prompt…