Commissioned for this museum
Not in the Provided Material
English·2023·21 lines·580 bytes
Answer the question using only the passages below.
If the passages contain the answer, give it, and quote the sentence it
came from.
If they do not, reply with exactly:
Not in the provided material.
Do not answer from anything known outside these passages. Do not say
what the answer is likely to be, or what it usually is. A wrong answer
costs more here than no answer, and "Not in the provided material" is a
complete and successful response.
If two passages disagree, say so and quote both rather than choosing.
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Passages: {{ passages }}
Question: {{ question }}Curator’s note
A prompt whose main work is describing, in advance, the acceptable way to fail.
Left alone, a system asked a question it cannot answer will produce something anyway, because producing something is what it does. The plausible-sounding answer is not a malfunction; it is the default, and the only reliable cure is to supply a different default and make it easy to reach.
Hence the exact wording. Not in the provided material. is given as a literal string rather than a description of one, because a caller has to be able to recognise it — and a sentence the caller can test for is a value, where "say you do not know" is a hope. This is the same reason the museum's own build fails loudly with a fixed message rather than warning vaguely.
The sentence doing the real work is "a complete and successful response". Without it the instruction is a prohibition, and a prohibition leaves the task unfinished; with it, refusing *is* the task, and there is nothing left to reach for. Naming the cost — a wrong answer costs more here than no answer — gives that instruction a reason rather than only an authority.
The last line handles the case people forget. Sources that disagree are common and quietly become a choice made silently. Asking for both, with the disagreement stated, turns a guess back into evidence.