Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Do you say please and thank you to your LLMs?

news.ycombinator.com

31–40 of 55 posts

Re: Ask HN: Do you say please and thank you to your LLMs?

#31

No, it doesn’t have feelings - it would be like asking your washing machine to please wash your pants? Anthropomorphising LLMs seems deeply unhealthy.

LLMs don't have feelings, but they imitate humans who do. If your prompt sounds rude to a human, LLMs might respond like a human who is talked to rudely, if you don't want that, prompt politely.

Chatbots go through a reinforcement learning phase, which should be enough to make the LLM helpful regardless of the tone of the prompt, but you may still get better result if your prompt is made in a way that would get the most helpful response from a human.

It is not anthropomorphizing, it is helping the LLM recognize a pattern.

Re: Ask HN: Do you say please and thank you to your LLMs?

#34
Does anyone really expect these neural reference books to be able to appreciate politeness and gratitude... They can probably imitate it, but it's unlikely to affect their usefulness or uselessness. Politeness and gratitude towards an LLM rather characterize the person themselves

Re: Ask HN: Do you say please and thank you to your LLMs?

#37
Yes.

If we reduce back to the “LLMs are next word prediction algorithms” and they have a huge training corpus including positive and negative human interactions, it’s not crazy to think they’ll be influenced by the flow of those learned interactions and respond subtly better to positive interactions than negative.

Re: Ask HN: Do you say please and thank you to your LLMs?

#38

Neither cursing nor thanking LLMs is useful. Relating in emotive syntax puts you in the wrong headspace to get the most out of the chat. We anthropomorphise things very easily -- dogs, toys, cars -- because we're wired as social beings to have theory of mind. It's no surprise that AI chat, which mimics us, is popular.

Dogs are social beings and have minds. They understand cursing and thanking. Maybe not the actual words, but certainly the emotion behind them.

Re: Ask HN: Do you say please and thank you to your LLMs?

#39
I don't say please and thank you to the LLM any more than I say please and thank you to my power drill after hanging a ceiling fan

I think it is ridiculous to even suggest

Imagine typing "please" and "thank you' into Google's search bar for the past 20 years. That would be absolutely nonsense right? So why would I use those words for an LLM

Post reply on HN