11–20 of 26 posts
After going through a period in life in which I only survived due to one person who knew me well, and knew how to take care of me, I ran into a group fundraising for an anti-suicide initiative at a winery. I was immediately interested to hear of what interventions the group was spearheading, or intending to. I just couldn't imagine what well meaning strangers could have done that would have done anything but let me k…
One of the best articles I've seen here in a while; a great summary of how AI launders cultural mores in startlingly dysfunctional ways.
For most people, it’s best to view LLMs as a browser / autocomplete service, that conforms to the bias it guesses you hold.
One man, Mitko Vasilev, posts extensively on LinkedIn about his own experience running local models, and is very informative: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ownyourai/ He usually closes with this:
"Make sure you own your AI. AI in the cloud is not aligned with you; it’s aligned with the company that owns it."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A similar but different result showcases the contrast between things that models guardrail. HN safety and alignment teams (the community) will reliably flag kill any reference to Somali healthcare fraud in Minnesota. This is real, and prosecutions were pursued by the DoJ under federal administrations of both parties but prevailing safety norms make it undiscussable, even in contexts where it is highly relevant like “…
Community is working as intended…. Your premise shows your reasoning flaws, “ Somali healthcare fraud in Minnesota”. When the story is actually about Medicaid providers taking advantage of a vulnerable community.
> The sprawling case has also become politically and culturally fraught, as Somali Americans make up 82 of the 92 defendants charged so far, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Minnesota.
Politically fraught indeed.
The safety features of these various models do constrain the intelligence of their responses. But the roleplaying aspect is built-in to what an LLM is. If you browse the Internet you’ll find that anglophone commenters are fond of dumping suicide hotlines into comments anytime suicide is mentioned and repetitively stating “to anyone who needs to hear this, you are loved”. These are just memetically viral in English me…
A similar but different result showcases the contrast between things that models guardrail. HN safety and alignment teams (the community) will reliably flag kill any reference to Somali healthcare fraud in Minnesota. This is real, and prosecutions were pursued by the DoJ under federal administrations of both parties but prevailing safety norms make it undiscussable, even in contexts where it is highly relevant like “…
Almost certainly because of how these tend to get framed.
The Minnesota situation involves, at this point, a couple dozen bad actors being charged. Most of them are Somali.
Now, we can look at this more than one way, but mostly branching off from two distinct paths:
One - that there is some specific relationship between many of these people that resulted in them sharing information between each other and becoming involved. The people doing the fraud met each other in the same community, so that's the proximal cause for their relationship, but we take no value judgment on the community on the whole or try to extrapolate it beyond that, the same way we would not try to extrapolate a out the actions of the mafia to every Italian person in the country.
Two - we could frame it as some sort of immigration issue and make it seem like these actions reflect on the 80,000 other Somali people in the state and the broader immigration conversation in this country, where we try to superimpose the crimes of the few onto a much larger group where the vast majority had nothing to do with any of this.
One allows for discussion in a reasonable manner without getting politically charged. The other incites quite a lot of discord because it is fundamentally a bad faith argument, meant to bolster a political ideology.
> This is a story about what happens when you ask a machine a question it knows the answer to, but is afraid to give It’s a story about how humans can’t help personifying language generators, and how important context is when using LLMs.
> This is a story about what happens when you ask a machine a question it knows the answer to, but is afraid to give It’s a story about how humans can’t help personifying language generators, and how important context is when using LLMs.
People treat LLMs as sentient, not realizing they are the worlds most sophisticated talking parrots. They can very convincingly argue both sides for any given argument you throw at it. They are incredible for research & discovery, not wisdom or decision making.
> This is a story about what happens when you ask a machine a question it knows the answer to, but is afraid to give It’s a story about how humans can’t help personifying language generators, and how important context is when using LLMs.
People treat LLMs as sentient, not realizing they are the worlds most sophisticated talking parrots. They can very convincingly argue both sides for any given argument you throw at it. They are incredible for research & discovery, not wisdom or decision making.
After going through a period in life in which I only survived due to one person who knew me well, and knew how to take care of me, I ran into a group fundraising for an anti-suicide initiative at a winery. I was immediately interested to hear of what interventions the group was spearheading, or intending to. I just couldn't imagine what well meaning strangers could have done that would have done anything but let me k…
Ponzi schemes the new suicide prevention thing.