“Tools to generate realistic prompts help surprisingly little with Petri audit realism” by Connor Kissane, Monte M, Fabien Roger

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Recorded02 Mar 2026

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TLDR We train and many-shot prompt base models to generate user prompts that are harder to distinguish from deployment (WildChat) prompts. Then we give Petri, an automated auditing agent, a tool to use a prompt generator model for sycophancy audits. It doesn’t help with making the full audit transcripts harder to distinguish from deployment transcripts, despite more realistic single-turn prompts. We find evidence that full audit realism is bottlenecked not by prompt quality, but by higher-level features: the harmful nature of the scenarios and the unnatural structure of the multi-turn conversations. 💻Code Research done as part of the Anthropic Fellows Program. Introduction Automated auditing agents like Petri are increasingly used to evaluate the propensities of LLMs. But one growing challenge is evaluation awareness: frontier models can often detect when they’re in an eval vs deployment, making audits harder to trust. As models improve at detecting LLM generated text, they may identify some audit scenarios by noticing that their input prompts are synthetic rather than human written. This motivates the need for better methods to generate realistic synthetic prompts. In this post we: Train and many-shot prompt base models to generate realistic user prompts, and show that these [...] ---Outline:(00:14) TLDR(01:01) Introduction(03:25) Methods(03:28) Training realistic user prompt generators(04:55) Evaluating prompt generators(05:44) Results(05:47) Prompt generator models produce realistic user prompts(09:06) Prompt generators dont improve Petri audit realism(12:07) User prompts arent the bottleneck: realism judge CoT analysis(14:28) Appendix(14:31) SFT prompt format(14:49) One failed attempt at training conditional text GAN --- First published: March 1st, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jdoDvKGLbaaJWnDpE/tools-to-generate-realistic-prompts-help-surprisingly-little --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

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