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Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages

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Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages

#212
post #49

While I love all these stories of turning your friends and loved ones into chat bots so you can talk to them forever, my brain immediately took a much darker turn because of course it did. How many emails, text messages, hangouts/gchat messages, etc, does Google have of you right now? And as part of their agreement, they can do pretty much whatever they like with those, can't they? Could Google, or any other company…

There's a scifi book I was reading a couple years ago that had this as a presence--models of people's personalities a la LLMs were a commodity, but they varied wildly in how accurate they were. Alphas were supposed to be 1-to-1 with the originating personality (to the point that they had legal protections? I can't remember), whereas gammas were used to menial things, like serving as a phone-menu style gatekeeper to t…

Yes, Revelation Space had alphas (which were illegal if I remember correctly) and betas (which were less capable but legal)

Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages

#213
post #49

While I love all these stories of turning your friends and loved ones into chat bots so you can talk to them forever, my brain immediately took a much darker turn because of course it did. How many emails, text messages, hangouts/gchat messages, etc, does Google have of you right now? And as part of their agreement, they can do pretty much whatever they like with those, can't they? Could Google, or any other company…

> Could Google, or any other company out there, build a digital copy of you that answers questions exactly the way you would? "Hey, we're going to cancel the interview- we found that you aren't a good culture fit here in 72% of our simulations and we don't think that's an acceptable risk."

Well, on the other hand, in the successful case, why bother hiring if the digital copy already answers all questions like you (except likely faster)?

Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages

#214
post #49

While I love all these stories of turning your friends and loved ones into chat bots so you can talk to them forever, my brain immediately took a much darker turn because of course it did. How many emails, text messages, hangouts/gchat messages, etc, does Google have of you right now? And as part of their agreement, they can do pretty much whatever they like with those, can't they? Could Google, or any other company…

Well, my maxim with AIs is that all they express is a lie unless proven true.

Nothing good can come out of taking too seriously the output of algebra parrots.

Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages

#215
I'm not clear as to how a conversation block is turned into one (or many?) samples. Is the first message in the block the input, and the remaining messages prefixed with sender names and concatenated as output? I know the code is all there but instead of picking it apart I would have preferred a more complete example mapping a block to sample, because I don't have a mental model of how LLMs learn from context. On the one hand I doubt individual input/output prompts from just two messages contain enough context, but I would have imagined that inserting names and concatenating multiple messages would be be equally misleading. Does the model generate an entire conversation from a single prompt, which is split before being sent by the chat app?

Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages

#216
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Edit: stop downvoting ideas you don’t like, that’s not what it’s for. I will continue to downvote creepy ideas as I please.

You are increasing the echo of the chamber.

The “idea” doesn’t even make any sense

Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages

#217
post #10

Great write up, thanks for posting. I’ve been thinking of doing this for myself. One thought that’s haunting: how long before AI friends are more interesting and stimulating than any real person would be, leading people to prefer AI over humans to befriend… Super stimulus to end all super stimuluses?

This is a concept in the sci-fi book The Mountain in the Sea , where people have "point-fives" (as in 0.5) -- AI companions custom-tailored to be the ideal zero-effort-required friend for you. In the book, it starts from someone jokingly observing that many people don't want a full relationship, with 2 full people learning one another and being there for each other -- instead, many people want just the easy/fun parts…

Perhaps this is the form that the singularity takes, not towards paperclips but towards the reality from that book. The 2020s will go down as a strange decade, that's for sure.

Re: Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages

#218
post #49

While I love all these stories of turning your friends and loved ones into chat bots so you can talk to them forever, my brain immediately took a much darker turn because of course it did. How many emails, text messages, hangouts/gchat messages, etc, does Google have of you right now? And as part of their agreement, they can do pretty much whatever they like with those, can't they? Could Google, or any other company…

That is the plot of Westworld
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