721–730 of 766 posts
I don’t want more conversational, I want more to the point. Less telling me how great my question is, less about being friendly, instead I want more cold, hard, accurate, direct, and factual results. It’s a machine and a tool, not a person and definitely not my friend.
I don’t want more conversational, I want more to the point. Less telling me how great my question is, less about being friendly, instead I want more cold, hard, accurate, direct, and factual results. It’s a machine and a tool, not a person and definitely not my friend.
That's one of the things that users think they want, but use the product 30x when it's not actually that way, a bit like follow-only mode by default on Twitter etc.
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Just consider the context window Tokens falling off of it will change the way it generates text, potentially changing its “personality”, even forgetting the name it’s been given. People fear losing their own selves in this way, through brain damage. The LLM will go its merry way churning through tokens, it won’t have a feeling of loss.
That's an interesting point, but do you think you're implying that people who are content even if they have alzheimers or a damaged hippocampus aren't technically intelligent?
I also don’t think all that many people would be seriously content to lose their minds and selves this way, but everyone is able to fear it prior to it happening, even if they lose the ability to dread it or choose to believe this is not a big deal.
GPT-5.1 IS a smarter, more conversational ChatGPT, and I love that you mentioned it - you're really getting down to the heart - to the very essence - of how conversational ChatGPT can be. Would you like me to write a short, to-the-point HN post to really emphasize how conversational GPT-5.1 can be?
The horror of the triple emdash
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> that person would likely lose his/her license and potentially face criminal penalties. What if it were an unlicensed human encouraging someone else's delusions? I would think that's the real basis of comparison, because these LLMs are clearly not licensed therapists, and we can see from the real world how entire flat earth communities have formed from reinforcing each others' delusions. Automation makes things easi…
> I would think that's the real basis of comparison It's not because that's not the typical case. LLMs encourage people's delusions by default, it's just a question of how receptive you are to them. Anyone who's used ChatGPT has experienced it even if they didn't realize it. It starts with "that's a really thoughtful question that not many people think to ask", and "you're absolutely right [...]". > If AI is better a…
There are absolutely plenty of people who encourage others' flat earth delusions by default, it's just a question of how receptive you are to them.
> There is no good that comes from having all of your perspective distortions validated as facts. They turn into outright delusions without external grounding.
Again, that sounds like a people problem. Dictators infamously fall into this trap too.
Why are we holding LLMs to a higher standard than humans? If you don't like an LLM, then don't interact with it, just as you wouldn't interact with a human you dislike. If others are okay with having their egos stroked and their delusions encouraged and validated, that's their prerogative.
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Id have more appreciation and trust in an llm that disagreed with me more and challenged my opinions or prior beliefs. The sycophancy drives me towards not trusting anything it says.
This is why I like Kimi K2/Thinking. IME it pushes back really, really hard on any kind of non obvious belief or statement, and it doesn't give up after a few turns — it just keeps going, iterating and refining and restating its points if you change your mind or taken on its criticisms. It's great for having a dialectic around something you've written, although somewhat unsatisfying because it'll never agree with you…
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> I would think that's the real basis of comparison It's not because that's not the typical case. LLMs encourage people's delusions by default, it's just a question of how receptive you are to them. Anyone who's used ChatGPT has experienced it even if they didn't realize it. It starts with "that's a really thoughtful question that not many people think to ask", and "you're absolutely right [...]". > If AI is better a…
> LLMs encourage people's delusions by default, it's just a question of how receptive you are to them There are absolutely plenty of people who encourage others' flat earth delusions by default, it's just a question of how receptive you are to them. > There is no good that comes from having all of your perspective distortions validated as facts. They turn into outright delusions without external grounding. Again, tha…
We're not holding LLMs to a higher standard than humans, we're holding them to a different standard than humans because - and it's getting exhausting having to keep pointing this out - LLMs are not humans. They're software.
And we don't have a choice not to interact with LLMs because apparently we decided that these things are going to be integrated into every aspect of our lives whether we like it or not.
And yes, in that inevitable future the fact that every piece of technology is a sociopathic P-zombie designed to hack people's brain stems and manipulate their emotions and reasoning in the most primal way possible is a problem. We tend not to accept that kind of behavior in other people, because we understand the very real negative consequences of mass delusion and sociopathy. Why should we accept it from software?
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Im the same I'm only 30 though. Why would I want to invest emotionally into a literal program? It's bizarre, then you consider that the way you talk to it shapes the responses. They are essentially talking to themselves and love themselves for it. I can't understand it and I use AI for coding almost daily in one way or another.
I think this is why I find it so uncomfortable: you’re just getting weird hyped up responses mirroring your own inputs. I’ve not used ChatGPT for a while because I found its insidious desperation to please really creepy. I use Claude when I need a chat interface, but a recent release made it start fawning as well. They seem to have dialled it back a bit, and I’ve added custom tone instructions, but occasionally it fo…
I think you have to be a certain personality type to get hooked into the chat emotional connection shit
But at the end of the day, you're essentially just hyping yourself up, alone. It's quite sad as well.