Controlling the text generated by language models and customizing the content has been a long-standing challenge. Existing prompting techniques proposed in pursuit of providing control are task-specific and lack generality; this provides overwhelming choices for non-expert users to find a suitable method for their task. The effort associated with those techniques, such as in writing examples, explanations, instructions, etc. further limits their adoption among non-expert users. In this paper, we propose a simple prompting strategy HELP ME THINK where we encourage GPT3 to help non-expert users by asking a set of relevant questions and leveraging user answers to execute the task. We demonstrate the efficacy of our technique HELP ME THINK on a variety of tasks. Specifically, we focus on tasks that are hard for average humans and require significant thinking to perform. We hope our work will encourage the development of unconventional ways to harness the power of large language models.

翻译：控制语言模型生成的文本并定制内容一直是一项长期挑战。现有为提供控制而提出的提示技术具有任务特异性且缺乏通用性；这为非专家用户寻找适合其任务的方法带来了过多选择。这些技术涉及的诸如编写示例、解释、指令等额外工作进一步限制了非专家用户对其的采用。在本文中，我们提出了一种简单的提示策略"HELP ME THINK"，通过鼓励GPT3向非专家用户提出一系列相关问题，并利用用户答案来执行任务。我们在多种任务上展示了"HELP ME THINK"技术的有效性，特别关注那些对普通人而言较为困难、需要大量思考才能完成的任务。我们希望我们的工作能够激励开发利用大型语言模型能力的非常规方法。