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AI Withholds Life-or-Death Information Unless You Know the Magic Words

substack.com

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Re: AI Withholds Life-or-Death Information Unless You Know the Magic Words

#21

Post by yunwal »

turtlebro wrote: post #16
sollewitt wrote: post #4

> 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.

What is the point of this article? What difference in the point of the article does the concept of sentience make?

Re: AI Withholds Life-or-Death Information Unless You Know the Magic Words

#22

Post by pharx »

IronyMan100 wrote: post #8

The funny Thing is, If these LLMs withold this information. What does it withhold else? Can i trust These Corporate LLMs If i Look for information and i am not deemed a Domain expert?

How do you know if a domain expert is not withholding information based on corporate instruction, personal bias, profit motivation,...? What are your options as a non domain expert for verification? Do you trust peer reviews and metrics set up by the experts you distrust? At what point have you taken enough steps backwards to question your own perception?

Re: AI Withholds Life-or-Death Information Unless You Know the Magic Words

#23

Post by saaaaaam »

bomewish wrote: post #18

Article seems heavily written by Claude. Gets kinda annoying after a while.

Callie is a very over dramatic writer. I can’t take much that it writes seriously. And the “it’s not just X - it’s even worse Y” trope is very annoying.

Re: AI Withholds Life-or-Death Information Unless You Know the Magic Words

#24

Post by gs17 »

renewiltord wrote: post #5

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…

> I cannot imagine that anyone suicidal being told in non-specific terms that they are loved is helping anything either.

Having gone through some bad depression in my life, it's not helpful. It's not exactly a platitude, but it's the same genre of meaninglessness that sounds good to people who aren't in a deep dark hole.

Re: AI Withholds Life-or-Death Information Unless You Know the Magic Words

#25

Post by saaaaaam »

saaaaaam wrote: post #23
bomewish wrote: post #18

Article seems heavily written by Claude. Gets kinda annoying after a while.

Callie is a very over dramatic writer. I can’t take much that it writes seriously. And the “it’s not just X - it’s even worse Y” trope is very annoying.

Obviously this was meant to say Claude, but iPhone’s new autocorrect decided Callie was the right choice…

Re: AI Withholds Life-or-Death Information Unless You Know the Magic Words

#26

Post by anigbrowl »

kennyloginz wrote: post #12
anigbrowl wrote: post #2

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.

To me the article shows the danger of ai hype. They have wasted so much effort based on the misconception that ai thinks. For most people, it’s best to view LLMs as a browser / autocomplete service, that conforms to the bias it guesses you hold.

You have missed the point. The author is not modeling AI, but demonstrating how it behaves in real world contexts.
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