A recent Medium article claims that adding challenge phrases like “I bet you can’t solve this” to AI prompts improves output quality by 45%, based on research by Li et al. (2023).

Quick Test Results

Testing these techniques on academic tasks—SQL queries, code debugging, and research synthesis—showed mixed but interesting results:

What worked: Challenge framing produced more thorough, systematic responses for complex multi-step problems. Confidence scoring (asking AI to rate certainty and re-evaluate if below 0.9) caught overconfident answers.

What didn’t: Simple factual queries showed no improvement.

The Why

High-stakes language doesn’t trigger AI emotions—it cues pattern-matching against higher-quality training examples where stakes were high.

Bottom Line

Worth trying for complex tasks, but expect higher token usage. Results are task-dependent, not universal.

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Source: Li et al. (2023), arXiv:2307.11760

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Source: Li et al. (2023), arXiv:2307.11760