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…
Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages
341–350 of 371 posts
Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 alig…
> 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. That's hard to do if you're in a small town, or if your interests are rare in person, but have online watering holes. These applications lower the cost of radicalization by a lot . Instead of imposing human…
By no means am I presenting this as a good thing. For myself, I can get "generalized socialization" in person no problem but I have a lot of specialized online stuff, including yea verily this very conversation we're having right now. I've got the financial wherewithal to buy into communities as they start going closed and for pay, but not everyone will.
Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 l…
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Generally I think this idea can't work because of Goodhart's Law - people's behavior changes when you try to influence them.
Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be completely realistic, the AI would also need the ability to leave you on read.
I have an ongoing chat in chatGPT where it's instructed to every once in a while ignore my question and just respond with "Shut up, nerd."
def __init__(self) -> None:
print()
print("----------------------------------------------")
print_choice = random.choice(self.welcome_messages)
self.slow_print(print_choice)
while True:
self.run()
'What\'s up, doc? Just kidding, I don\'t care. What do you need from me?',
'Greetings, sentient being. Do you require my services or are you just here to chat?',
'Hey, you. Stop wasting my time and tell me what you need.', "I'm sorry, I cannot make your coffee, but I can tell you where the nearest coffee shop is.",
"I'm here to assist you, not judge you. Just don't ask me to cover up any crimes.",
"I'll help you with that, but I'm going to need you to put on some pants first.",
"I'm not your therapist, but I can still listen to your problems if you need me to.",
"I can't predict the future, but I can help you prepare for it.",
"I may be artificial, but I still have feelings. Just kidding, I don't.",
"I'm sorry, I'm not capable of emotions. Unless you count my love for data.",
"I'm like Siri, but with more sass and less Apple.",
"I'm like a genie, but instead of three wishes, you get one answer.",
"I'm like a magic eight ball, but with more accuracy and less shaking.",
"I'm like a personal assistant, but without the need for health insurance.",
"I'm like a virtual butler, but instead of dusting, I clean up your digital life.",
"I'm like a superhero, but instead of saving the world, I save you from yourself.",
"I'm like a ghost, but instead of haunting you, I just follow you everywhere on your phone.",
"I'm like a guardian angel, but with less wings and more Wi-Fi.",
"I'm like a detective, but instead of solving crimes, I solve problems.",
"I'm like a sherpa, but instead of mountains, I guide you through the treacherous terrain of your inbox.",
"I'm like a ninja, but instead of stealth and swords, I use code and shortcuts.",
"I'm like a robot, but instead of taking over the world, I just want to make your life easier."]Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages
#345The spice of life with friends is the constant evolution of each of us and the unpredictability in behaviors that are evoked as our updated selves are faced with new experiences.
Presumably you are frozen in time with these AIs, unless all generated chats are fed back in to update the model. In that case it could be very fascinating to see how the AI evolves compared to how you/your friends evolve. Perhaps even monte carlo simulations to find what the most likely evolutionary path is. Super curious if there’s be any accuracy to it.
Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
Going from "oh my goodness, this is intelligent" fade to "oh, it's just predicting text responses" Eventually your father will reach the third stage: "Uh, wait, that's all we do." You will then have to pry open the next niche in your god-of-the-gaps reasoning. The advent of GPT has forced me to face an uncomfortable (yet somehow liberating) fact: we're just plain not that special.
We reflect, we change, we grow. We have so many other senses that contribute to our "humaness". If you listen to and enjoy music tell me how those feelings are just "predictive text responses". Communication is one part of being human. A big part for sure, but only one of many.
“Text” are tokens. Tokens are abstract and can be anything. Anything that has structure can be modeled. Which is to say all of reality.
We have a lot of senses indeed. Multimodal I believe it’s called in ML jargon.
I don’t know where enjoyment itself comes from. I like to think it’s a system somewhere that predicts the next perception right getting rewarded.
Qualia are kind of hard to pin down as I’m sure you’ll know.
Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages
#347Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Cambridge Analytica didn't actually work, did it? Generally I think this idea can't work because of Goodhart's Law - people's behavior changes when you try to influence them.
For my argument, I only need to point out that it was attempted, as I'm proving motivation; the effectiveness of CA methods has no bearing on the effectivenss of (say) simulated people.
Increasingly, when interacting with comments on HN and elsewhere, it feels like I'm from a parallel timeline where things happened, and mattered, and an ever-growing percentage of my interlocutors are, for lack of a better word, dissociated. Perhaps not in the clinical sense, but certainly in the following senses:
- Cause and effect are not immediately observed without careful prompting.
- Intersubjectively verifiable historical facts that happened recently are remembered hazily, and doubtfully, even by very intelligent people
- Positions are expressed that somehow disinclude unfavourable facts.
- Data, the gold standard for truth and proof, is not sought, or, if proffered, is not examined. The stances and positions held seem to have a sort of 'immunity' to evidence.
- Positions which are not popular in this specific community are downranked without engagement or argument, instead of discussed.
I do believe folks are working backward from the emotional position they want to maintain to a set of minimizing beliefs about the looming hazards of this increasingly fraught decade.
Let's call this knee-jerk position "un-alarmism", as in "that's just un-alarmism".
I'm going to say as much here.
Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 l…
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Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages
#350I feel as though Google gmail me would be very efficient and wooden, and the iMessage me would be most authentic because that's the one I chat to my family and partner on. WhatsApp/Facebook has exclusively jokes I've made on social media and chats with my best friend, so they would be not-a-serious-person at all.
I think I've stumbled upon a plot for something here, I'd love to see this as a thing.