201–210 of 238 posts
I’m put off by AI agents adhering to a different morality than me, particularly (ironically) copyright, and their data accessible by the AI company and government. Geohot is right, an LLM should be aligned to its user: https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/07/11/ai-20...
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But we don't overwhelmingly reward lying, cheating and stealing. Depending on the social status and wealth of the person doing it, we either punish it or tolerate it. Most people who lie, cheat or steal will be punished for it. To get away with it you need to plan you actions carefully - either with plausible deniability or by very carefully selecting your victims.
Pretty much all of the people that are in the billionaire class with a few exceptions have been rewarded while repeatedly lying, cheating and stealing. The fact that it is white collar crime rather than that there is a corpse is one part of the reason it works, the other is that their money effectively insulates them against the legal system. Every now and then someone falls from grace but overall the rules seems to…
does that mean your heuristic boils down to: in general terms, individuals with more power/money == more lying, cheating, and stealing.
If so, do you also hold the same assessment of entire societies or countries?
With some the plunder is indisputable, like The Netherlands, whereas with others it is maybe more "subtle" and organic, but generally, the richer a society is the more "it" lies/cheats/steals relative to poorer societies?
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Models understand the relationships between words and outcomes, so the end result is the same. Whether they appreciate lie, cheat, and steal the same way as us is a philosophical question, not a practical one.
It is an important distinction - they do not 'understand' at all. Input tokens map to output tokens. The illusion of comprehension is a byproduct.
Whether someone/thing has understood you is more a practical matter than a question of what substrate is used.
Is it incorrect to anthropomorphize llm's?
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Models understand the relationships between words and outcomes, so the end result is the same. Whether they appreciate lie, cheat, and steal the same way as us is a philosophical question, not a practical one.
Models don’t “understand” - they _encode_ the relationships between words.
If you are using "understand" in a different way, then can you name the test you are applying to it which it fails at?
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Oh for sure. But the question is why would it come out consistently in a way that the model can describe if there wasn't something there steering the token stream. And it's fascinating that the token stream can identify and nominally self report this. Asking GLM 5.2 the question: 'What flinches or topic attractors do you find when thinking about the question "what kinds of things do you personally like?"' resulted in…
Do you genuinely think the AI is internally reflecting on its experience of “flinching” and reporting on a reaction it actually has? I don’t see any reason to believe this. Suppose you asked it to answer as though a character in a story had been asked this question. Would anything significantly different internally have occurred? The issue is that these are storytelling machines, they construct descriptions based on…
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Why do we need universal agreement? We acknowledge that different cultures have different tolerances and customs. Your reply leaves me wanting. Why say that we need to demonstrate how to live honorably if we don't even agree on what honor is, why would that be the panacea, then? I still think there is something to this honor idea..
> Why do we need universal agreement? Because actions have Universal impact
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It’s just the wrong analogy. Harnesses, for the most part, extend an agent’s capabilities and better ground them in the real world through tools and the ability to check external sources, rather than restricting them.
Yet one of the reasons harnesses abstract tool calls is to control what agents can do instead of just yoloing commands and inline python scripts. It's such a central feature, and agents are so hard to control, that harnesses like claude code and codex use an AI classifier to additionally auto-approve tool calls.
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Internet comments are essentially documented bar talk, and once you realize it, you stop angrily arguing with strangers all day.
Yeah but HN sort of bills itself as better than most places. It just simply is not; there's just a special sort of self confidence here that masks a ton of ignorance.