Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

People are just as bad as my LLMs

wilsoniumite.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 173 posts

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#61

Post by mdp2021 »

geonineties wrote: post #55
mdp2021 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Misanthropic is when some people dislike other people. Racist is when some people attribute some dubious quality to all people in some category.

(dropped the snark) Racist means grouping according to race, or potentially geographic origins. The word for what you're describing is probably closest to discriminatory, or prejudicial. However, misanthropic is probably more correct as the paper applies to all people negatively.

> racist

And in fact there are people that go "all humans are ". They have made "one big race". Historically the term (with predecessors like 'racialism' has had even other related nuances, e.g. superiority), but the matter does not change. I picked the term in its spirit.

> prejudicial

Prejudice can hit individuals and groups of disconnected individuals; "racist" is for prejudice against some (in theory) internally connected group.

> discriminatory

The opposite: the proponents do not discriminate (they do not make a distinction recognizing that some individuals are different from the supposed median in the group). (You are thinking of 'discriminate' as "hitting a group vs other groups".)

> misanthropic

Misanthropy is not necessarily attributing specific (undesirable) qualities to the group.

--

Now, since the occasion is there: could you please do me a favour? I never understood what "snark" instead is meant to mean, what people want to say with that. I asked other times (it is used in the guidelines), the only reply I ever got is sniping. Could you be so kind to explain what "snark" and "snarky" are supposed to mean? A non analytical reply (as opposed to this very branch of posts) suffices.

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#64

Post by le-mark »

Human level artificial intelligence has never had much appeal to me, there are enough idiots in the world, why do we need artificial ones? Ie if average machine intelligence mirrored human IQ distribution?

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#65

Post by Geezus_42 »

Jensson wrote: post #29
d4mi3n wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that we bias towards numbers with cultural or personal significance. 7 is lucky in western cultures and is religiously significant (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7#Culture ). 42 is culturally significant in science fiction, though that's a lot more recent. There are probably other examples, but I imagine the mean converges on numbers with multiple cultural touchpoints.

I have never heard of 7 being a lucky number in western culture and your link doesn't support that. 3 is a lucky number, 13 is an unlucky number, 7 is nothing to me. So I don't think its that, 7 is still a very common "random number" here even though there is no special cultural significance to it.

It's associated with Christ by several Protestant Christian denominations.

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#66

Post by sponnath »

K0balt wrote: post #35

I know this is only adjacent to OP’s point, but I do find it somewhat ironic that it is easy to find people who are just as unreliable and incompetent at answering questions correctly as a 7b model, but also a lot less knowledgeable. Also, often less capable of carrying on a decent conversation. I’ve noticed an periconcious urge when talking to people to judge them against various models and quants, or to decide they…

A decent conversation about what?

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#67

Post by rainsford »

leptons wrote: post #34
jopsen wrote: post #27

But an LLM can't be held accountable.. neither can most employees, but we often forget that :)

Employees get fired all the time, and the more wrong answers I get from an LLM, the less I use it until it's never used again.

But an LLM doesn't understand "never used again" as a consequence and the threat of it is useless as a motivation to improve (also because LLMs have no concept of "motivation" or "threats" or anything else).

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#68

Post by icelancer »

mplewis wrote: post #45
smallnix wrote: post #20

Is my understanding wrong that LLMs are trained to emulate observed human behavior in their training data? From that follows that LLMs fit to produce all kinds of human biases. Like preferring the first choice out of many, and the last our of many (primacy biases). Funnily the LLM might replicate the biases slightly wrong and by doing so produce new derived biases.

LLMs don't emulate human behavior. They spit out chunks of words in an order that parrots some of their training data.

Are you sure that humans are much more than this in terms of spoken/written language?

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#69

Post by megadata »

At least LLMs are very often ready so acknowledge they might be wrong.

It can be incredibly hard to get a person to acknowledge that they might be remotely wrong on a topic they really care about.

Or, for some people, the thought that they might be wrong about anything attall is just like blasphemy to them.

Post reply on HN