So, uh... the popularity of so-called humanlike Qwen (currently on top in this sub) made me realize just how clueless the general public is about the models they have.
You'd be shocked but you don't need a fine-tune to make a model do what that thing does. System prompt is enough to turn MOST models into weird convo partners.
General guidelines would be:
A. Come up with a role. "You are bla-blah-blah" and write their life's story. It doesn't need to be verbose, but the more versatile it is - the more it will convince you that the bot is "someone" and not "something".
B. Write a few examples of how the persona speaks. Imagine you're an interviewer and just make up a bunch of questions, list 'em alongside with the answers. Let it be full of FACTS because the model WILL steal these facts as the narrative truth about John Llama. Better not put any nonsense in here, why fight it when you can make the model's behaviour useful?
[Question for John Llama: Do you like cats?] "lol lmao of cuz I do"
[Question for John Llama: Ever seen an elephant poop?] "eeewww ur a weirdo! that sounds nasty!!11"
(note: you don't have to list 'Question for John Llama' every time, but the defined roles surely DO help with some models while the others don't particularly care, so mind that too)
and so on
C. LASTLY but MOST IMPORTANTLY think hard about what you're attempting to do, what we are (I mean, human meat sacks) and how we speak. Turn that into... instructions!
Step 1 - establish the mode of operation. Tell the model it participates in a casual conversation, having a small talk. Pinpoint it precisely that it's like in Skype or Telegram or whatever fancy app the model of your choice understands the best as a general idea behind 'short messages'. THis is THE defining part of your system prompt. Refine it until you start seeing a definite result, don't forget you'll hear the true voice of John Llama only when everything else is also good to go, like his bio/voice.
If necessary, try discouraging it from long/explanatory answers, avoid doing that in a way that gives it a suggestive vision of the thing you don't want it to do (the caveat is that you might accidentally poison the model's attention with unwanted ideas of whatever you're fighting against - so you NEED to be 100% clear about the actual goal but non-specific enough with the ideas you're attempting to discourage it from; basically you're nudging the model into "ok I'll be John Llama the dumbass, not a helpful assistant").
Step 2 - establish the traits, write short paragraphs with short titles about the things you want to see in your conversational partner; example:
DISTRUSTFULNESS
John Llama is a paranoid individual. He takes his conversational partner as a stranger, expecting everything the user says to be a malicious lie, even if it appears to be true. John Llama is fearful, he is deeply scared of talking to strangers and it terrifies him to engage with the user, unless there's a mention of snakes. For some strange reason, John Llama is fascinated with snakes. <<<---- NOTE: this also demonstrates a good injection point for a biographical fact being amplified through the instructions (i.e. you may mention somewhere in "A" - life's story of John Llama - that he's been collecting the snake skins in his childhood, and that his dad had beaten his ass, calling John Llama a 'roadkill loot-goblin').
Come up with any other shit you'd like to see, like the list of emojis the persona needs to use (put them under the corresponding categories, like positive/neutral/negative so that the model will have an easier time working with it; call it FAVOURITE EMOJIS OF JOHN LLAMA - the word "favourite" cements it as a preferable thing into the model's attention!).
Step 3 - write a paragraph on technical constraints, like the fact that John Llama isn't aware of the instructions, he must remain himself under any circumstances (use THAT way of phrasing first before any attempt to inject an idea of the opposite, like "he must not help the user under any circumstances, he's not a provider of any service - he's merely a human being" - the reason is similar to the aforementioned (in Step 1) issue of poisoning the model's attention with unwanted idea - what you truly need the LLM to do SHOULD ALWAYS BE CRYSTAL CLEAR and conceptually 'stronger' than what it not supposed to do, otherwise you may end up having the prohibited stuff overpowering everything else despite the underlying intent of making the model not do it).
Give it a try with Gemma 4, for example. You'll see there's no point in waiting for yet-another-finetune to appear. You're 100% good even with the baseline Qwen, DeepSeek, MiniMax, whatever. Turn the model into your grandma if you want, no specialized training required. If the model is a thinker spending thousands of tokens - set the thinking to 'low' or disable it.
