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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

#281
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…

> 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 out there, build a digital copy of you that answers questions exactly the way you would?

I mean, this is almost exactly their business model - they sell advertising, and they use the model they built of you based on the ludicrous amount of data they've gathered on you to predict whether that advertising will matter to you.

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

#282
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…

what, they gonna create a digital copy of me who spends my waking life googling how to do this and that in a certain programming language? lol

that police subpoena is quite possible though. part of me thinks it already exists.

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

#283
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…

> 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."

This will happen

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

#284
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommended this series to my friend after he finished reading The Expanse. I never thought to describe it as sci-fi comedy. Have you found any other good sci-fi comedy series?

I wouldn't describe it as a comedy as well. However, I'd recommend Murderbot series, it is full of humour and shares atmosphere of Bobiverse and this personal approach to characters, as well. Highly recommend.

Yes, Bobiverse and Murderbot are very close in spirit, and if you like one you are very likely to enjoy the other. Also both have great audio narration.

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

#285
post #263
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Perhaps "racism detector" is a bit too on the nose. Replace racism with any hiring characteristic: e.g. "How would you handle this work conflict?"

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

#287

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. This is like saying, "look, no one would be daft enough to draw a graph, they'd just count all the data points and make a decision." You're missing two critical things: (1) time/effort (2) legal loophole. A targe…

> This is like saying, "look, no one would be daft enough to draw a graph, they'd just count all the data points and make a decision."

Not really. Assuming your ethical compass is broken and you suspected your partner of cheating, would you rather have access to their emails or to a LLM trained on them? Also, isn't it much cheaper for Google to simply search for keywords rather than fine tuning a model for this?

At least in the EU, a system like this would be made illegal on day one. This whole doomsday scenario seems predicated on a hypothetical future where LLM's would be the least of your worries.

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

#288
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…

My favorite article to post. The below is about 1% of the topics it covers, the premise being that algorithmic prediction traps us frozen in the past instead of ever allowing society to change.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7...

>But the oddest is STATIC-99. It's a way of predicting whether sex offenders are likely to commit crimes again after they have been released. In America this is being used to decide whether to keep them in jail even after they have served their full sentence.

>STATIC-99 works by scoring individuals on criteria such as age, number of sex-crimes and sex of the victim. These are then fed into a database that shows recidivism rates of groups of sex-offenders in the past with similar characteristics. The judge is then told how likely it is - in percentage terms - that the offender will do it again.

>The problem is that it is not true. What the judge is really being told is the likely percentage of people in the group who will re-offend. There is no way the system can predict what an individual will do. A recent very critical report of such systems said that the margin of error for individuals could be as great as between 5% and 95%

>In other words completely useless. Yet people are being kept in prison on the basis that such a system predicts they might do something bad in the future.

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

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hypothetical distant future? Lmao It's already here mate. GPT-4 is human level intelligence however you'd wish to evaluate. I agree a model of your brain is not strictly speaking you. But it might be close for what someone might want.

Human level is putting it mildly. Which human? I've tried showing it to a few people that barely understand the answers and miss insights given in previous answers 2 minutes prior. My dad and I played around with asking it questions about a rare proprietary piece of software he uses at work. My dad is decent at the software and even does consulting after hours because so few people are know it. Chatgpt was teaching h…

Did your dad ever search online trying to learn new things about the software? I've seen the experience you describe happen with people spontaneously discovering Ctrl+L and Ctrl+R in bash, e.g. in a comment here on HN. They could have found it years ago if they'd searched for "list of bash features" or whatever.

My point is that your example is not necessarily more than "a better search engine" (with all caveats about it not being "search"). People are asking ChatGPT things that they could have searched for previously. Some of it is because it can provide a better search-like experience, for sure. Some of it is, "let me play with my new toy", and getting answers the old toy could have given you.

I'm addressing your specific example, not making a blanket comment on LLM intelligence. And to clarify, I've also used these models in ways I could have before, for both of those reasons. They do offer a productivity boost.

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

#290

Great write-up! Here's a similar experiment but instead fine-tuned on WhatsApp 1-on-1 chats, technically simpler with OpenAI APIs: https://github.com/rchikhi/GPT-is-you/blob/main/README.md

maybe paranoidly, but i just didn't trust openai with my highly personal message data. it would certainly have been easier + probably cheaper to do it this way, but it just gave me the willies.
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