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Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages

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Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages

#261

Post by SanderNL »

softfalcon wrote: post #254
SanderNL wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand better now, thanks for the explanation. I have some experience in the other direction: everyone around me is hyperskeptical and throwing around the “stochastic parrot”. Meanwhile completely ignoring how awesome this is, what the potential of the whole field is. Like it’s cool to be the “one that sees the truth”. I see this like a 70’s computer. In and of itself not that earth shattering, but man.. the po…

Oh, yeah, I hear you on that as well. It's still a really cool tool! Probabilistic algorithms and other types of decision layering was mostly theory when I was in University. Seeing it go from a "niche class for smart math students" to breaking headlines all over the world is definitely pretty wild. You are correct that nothing like this was even possible a couple decades ago. From a pure progress and innovation pers…

Oh yeah, the “should”. I agree on that one. One way or another, it’s going to be an interesting ride.

Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages

#262

Post by CatWChainsaw »

grugagag wrote: post #11

Neat. But I fail to see any useful use case for this. As a learning experience it’s greeat though

You can use it to replace the people you care most about in life if you have so much as a petty argument, because machines are perfect and people are not. :)

Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages

#263

Post by CSSer »

rcme wrote: post #260
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Could Google, or any other company out there, build a digital copy of you that answers questions exactly the way you would? "Hey, we're going to cancel the interview- we found that you aren't a good culture fit here in 72% of our simulations and we don't think that's an acceptable risk." If a company is going to snoop in your personal data to get insights about you, they'd just do it directly. Hiring managers would…

> If a company is going to snoop in your personal data to get insights about you, they'd just do it directly. Hiring managers would scroll through your e-mails and make judgment calls based on their content. Maybe, but LLMs have incredibly intricate connections between all the different parameters in the model. For instance, perhaps someone who does mundane things X, Y, Z, also turns out to be racist. An LLM can buil…

I think any HR manager or legal professional that would let a company anywhere near this shouldn't be employed as such. This sounds like a defamation lawsuit waiting to happen.

Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages

#264

Post by JasonZ2 »

evandale wrote: post #107

I was talking to a non-tech friend about all the AI advancements lately and when she asked me what I thought the biggest risk was I said it's exactly what we all just experienced the past 3 years and realized is awful for human - prolonged social isolation. My biggest worry is that AI generated art (be it photos, music, code, etc.) and AI assistants will become so good we won't need other humans to get our social fix…

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Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages

#265

Post by JasonZ2 »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #231

I've heard several people doing this and chatting with simulacra of their friends, but you can always just send your friends a message and chat with the real version. My first inclination was always to try a conversation with a virtual me (yay recursion!) I've always thought that would be fascinating. Or scanning in my old journals from when I was a teenager and training it on that. Once this technology improves a bi…

[dead]

Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages

#266

Post by jerf »

macNchz wrote: post #97

I’ve read plenty about the potential catastrophe of AI putting people out of work or becoming uncontrollable in some grand sci-fi way, but uses like this make me the most concerned for the near-mid term. Broadly I think the internet, social media, and to some degree the physical arrangement of suburban/car dependent living has had a negative impact on genuine human connection. While the ability of people to interact…

At the moment, I'm having a hard time imagining how this all does not terminate in people returning to more direct human engagements, and limiting interaction online to people we've physically met and validated.

I can sit here and name dozens of entities willing to spend millions or billions of dollars building the tech to influence me individually at scale with AIs, each for their own reasons, none of which are aligned with my actual interests except for a fringe here and there for sheer coincidence reasons. The only winning move becomes not to play. It's clearly a tragedy of the commons for those entities because their efforts will ruin the internet for all of them but there is no chance whatsoever that they can coordinate their efforts to prevent it, so the game theory is clear for each of them: Go all in on exploiting the opportunity as fast as possible, as thoroughly as possible, for as much benefit as possible.

This could well happen faster than we realize. I held out some hope that the expense of it would slow things down, but people keep getting to where they're running this on a RaspPi and such, and the models are clearly out in the wild so the cost of starting up is negligible.

The only thing I can think of that would even slow this process down is to drop basically every site that accepts user input (like HN, reddit, etc.) behind a paywall significant enough to inhibit mass account creation. That doesn't solve the problem, just slows it down. Otherwise I literally see nothing between us and the Dead Internet Theory in two, three years tops.

Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages

#267

Post by Wowfunhappy »

softfalcon wrote: post #122
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for possibly stealing artist's work in the open source domain The provenance of the training set is key. Every LLM company so far has been extremely careful to avoid using people's private data for LLM training, and for good reason. If a company were to train an LLM exclusively on a single person's private data and then use that LLM to make decisions about that person, the intention is very clearly to access that p…

I've spoken with a lawyer about data collection in the past and I think there might be a case if you were to: - collect thousands of people's data - anonymize it - then shadow correlate the data in a web - then trace a trail through said web for each "individual" - then train several individuals as models - then abstract that with a model on top of those models Now you have a legal case that it's merely an academic r…

I realize that data can be de-anonymized, but if the same party anonymized and de-anonymized the data... well, IANAL, and you apparently talked to one, but that doesn't seem like something a court would like.

Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages

#268

Post by wpietri »

This is great!

One of the things that I find horrific about a lot of LLM projects is that people are taking them so seriously. "They're going to destroy the world!" Or, worse, "I've taken $25m in VC money to see if I can destroy one part of the world!"

But this is lighthearted fun. Instead of putting it in a context where the LLM tendency to bullshit is a problem, here's it's exactly what is needed.

Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages

#269

Post by netsharc »

falcor84 wrote: post #249
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #231

I've heard several people doing this and chatting with simulacra of their friends, but you can always just send your friends a message and chat with the real version. My first inclination was always to try a conversation with a virtual me (yay recursion!) I've always thought that would be fascinating. Or scanning in my old journals from when I was a teenager and training it on that. Once this technology improves a bi…

>... but you can always just send your friends a message and chat with the real version. Well, until they aren't there anymore.

Like this in 2016 (before it became easy like nowadays) https://www.theverge.com/a/luka-artificial-intelligence-memo...

Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages

#270

Post by rzzzt »

burglekutt wrote: post #119
mabbo wrote: post #49

While I love all these stories of turning your friends and loved ones into chat bots so you can talk to them forever, my brain immediately took a much darker turn because of course it did. How many emails, text messages, hangouts/gchat messages, etc, does Google have of you right now? And as part of their agreement, they can do pretty much whatever they like with those, can't they? Could Google, or any other company…

There’s a (good) short story in a (great) sci-fi book called “Valuable Humans in Transit” about something like this. If I remember correctly, Google learns to perfectly simulate people and then the real people disappear.

Owl Turd has a short story wrapped in web comic form exploring this exact situation (group chat × Theseus' ship): https://shencomix.tumblr.com/post/696189256410005504
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