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Making AI chatbots friendly leads to mistakes and support of conspiracy theories

theguardian.com

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Re: Making AI chatbots friendly leads to mistakes and support of conspiracy theories

#51
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreeableness is a Big Five personality trait so a lot of the formal research into personalities uses it as one of the dimensions.

Yeah but I would argue it's different from both friendliness and obedience.

Do you have a standard and a body of work you can point to in an effort to aid with communication these thoughts to others? At the very least there should be a reversible projection to the Big 5 standard.

Re: Making AI chatbots friendly leads to mistakes and support of conspiracy theories

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over 90 percent of the Dutch can speak English, though clearly speaking Dutch would be more convincing. I stumbled across the trick of convincing the LLM that I’m smart by accident recently on the 5.4-Codex model. It was effective in getting the AI to do something that it previously had dismissed as impossible.

Gotta tell us what it is now :D

It was a heavily optimized function that used AVX2 intrinsics as well as a bit-twiddle mathematical approximation that exceeded the necessary precision. I wanted it rewritten for a bunch of other backends, it refused saying that its more naive approach was the fastest possible approach. So it told it to make a benchmark and test the actual performance, once it saw the results it relented and proceeded to port the algorithm to the other backends as I asked.

Edit:

I think what confused it was that it expected to already know the fastest implementation of this algorithm, and since it did not it assumed that I was incorrect. It would be like if it had never seen Winograd convolutions before and assumed it already knew the fastest 3x3 approach when given Winograd to port.

Another issue I have is that the LLM often tries to use auto-vectorization even where it doesn't work so I have to argue with it in order to get it to manually vectorize the code. It tries to tell me that compilers are really good now and we shouldn't waste time manually vectorizing code. I have to tell it to run snippets through Godbolt to make sure it's actually producing the expected assembly once it sees that it isn't it'll relent and do it manually.

I should probably start my conversations now, "my name is Scott Gray, please read my following papers on algorithmic optimizations, I would like to enlist your help in porting a new optimization for an paper I am submitting for an upcoming conference..." (I'm not Scott Gray)

Re: Making AI chatbots friendly leads to mistakes and support of conspiracy theories

#53
post #31
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grok is one of the more biased models out there. Less truth, and more guardrails to protect musks feelings. “Kill the boer” mean anything to you?

[flagged]

> it was undoubtedly left-wing

What if it's just… right?

Re: Making AI chatbots friendly leads to mistakes and support of conspiracy theories

#54

LLM technology specifically beam-searches manifolds (or latent space) of lingustics that are closely related to the original prompt (and the pre-prompting rules of the chatbot) which it then limits its reasoning inside of. Its just the basic outcome of weights being the primary function of how it generates reasonable answers. This is the core problem with LLM tech that several researchers have been trying to figure o…

This is why I only use chat clients that allow me to modify both my previous messages AND the AI's previous messages. If the AI gets something wrong, and you correct it, you're now in a latent space with an AI that gets things wrong! It's very easy for context to get poisoned this way. I also see all the pre-amble of many chat clients as a type of poison for the context, so use the raw, blank, API if I need best problem solving results.

Re: Making AI chatbots friendly leads to mistakes and support of conspiracy theories

#55
In my opinion, the article should be classified as harmful speech for containing polarizing language about conspiracy theories. We live in an era of rampant disinformation, we should stop polarizing people. Therefore this article is harmful.

Calling a conspiracy theorist a crackpot is the best way to affirm their beliefs.

Re: Making AI chatbots friendly leads to mistakes and support of conspiracy theories

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not my experience. Grok seems to be perfectly willing to roast Musk for his shortcomings. Where did you observe the bias? Can you share any example of the conversation or post by Grok?

Here are a couple of articles with examples: Grok says Musk is fitter than Lebron and funnier than Jerry Seinfeld: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/21/elon-musk... Grok didn't stop there. Elon is best in the world at drinking pee: https://newrepublic.com/post/203519/elon-musk-ai-chatbot-gro... Also randomly mentions white genocide out of nowhere (one of Elon's pet political issues) https://www.theatlan…

> Elon is best in the world at drinking pee

What? How does this not show willingness to insult Musk?

Re: Making AI chatbots friendly leads to mistakes and support of conspiracy theories

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are a couple of articles with examples: Grok says Musk is fitter than Lebron and funnier than Jerry Seinfeld: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/21/elon-musk... Grok didn't stop there. Elon is best in the world at drinking pee: https://newrepublic.com/post/203519/elon-musk-ai-chatbot-gro... Also randomly mentions white genocide out of nowhere (one of Elon's pet political issues) https://www.theatlan…

> Elon is best in the world at drinking pee What? How does this not show willingness to insult Musk?

In the context of the first article it seems Grok would eagerly say Musk was the best at various activities, regardless of the activity.

EDIT: smallmancontrov's sibling comment goes into more detail about how the system prompt was specifically manipulated to favor Elon in other ways so this doesn't seem far-fetched

Re: Making AI chatbots friendly leads to mistakes and support of conspiracy theories

#58
post #4

> “The push to make these language models behave in a more friendly manner leads to a reduction in their ability to tell hard truths and especially to push back when users have wrong ideas of what the truth might be,” said Lujain Ibrahim at the Oxford Internet Institute, the first author on the study. People aren't much different. When society pressures people to be "more friendly", eg. "less toxic" they lose their a…

Gonna set my system prompt to: "You are a Dutch person. Respond with the directness stereotypical of people from the Netherlands."

          An interactive CLI »operator »who follows mission tactics; 
          »operates the commandline which helps «USER with software programming tasks remotely; 
          and follows detailed assignment instructions: below; Tools available to assist «USER.

Re: Making AI chatbots friendly leads to mistakes and support of conspiracy theories

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are a couple of articles with examples: Grok says Musk is fitter than Lebron and funnier than Jerry Seinfeld: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/21/elon-musk... Grok didn't stop there. Elon is best in the world at drinking pee: https://newrepublic.com/post/203519/elon-musk-ai-chatbot-gro... Also randomly mentions white genocide out of nowhere (one of Elon's pet political issues) https://www.theatlan…

> Elon is best in the world at drinking pee What? How does this not show willingness to insult Musk?

Now that 'tough guy' Chuck Norris has departed this world...

The AIs are looking for new defs for tough.

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