Ambiguity in language

The common thread between legal drafting and LLM prompting lies in this:

Both aim to reduce ambiguity in order to control output.

A vague clause can lead to misinterpretations, disputes and costly litigation due to differing party assumptions. A vague prompt, like an unclear instruction lacking context, can result in irrelevant, incorrect, or inconsistent outputs, undermining the intended task.

Both can have costly business implications.

In law, legal precision exists to constrain interpretive freedom. Legal instruments like legislation, contracts and agreements are drafted to ensure that rights, duties, and remedies are clearly defined and uniformly understood.

In LLMs, precise language in prompts aims to constrain the model’s probabilistic behaviour, to reduce variance, hallucination, and irrelevant responses.

In both cases, the goal is the same:

Minimise the scope of variance in interpretation and output. Collapse the range of possible interpretations into one predictable, intended outcome.