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Should We Respect LLMs? A Study on Influence of Prompt Politeness on Performance

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Re: Should We Respect LLMs? A Study on Influence of Prompt Politeness on Performance

#71

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

causalmodels wrote: post #17

Personally I think people should generally be polite and respectful towards the models. Not because they have feelings, but because cruelty degrades those who practice it.

Yes. I tend to be polite to LLMs. I admit that part of the reason is that I'm not 100% sure they're not conscious, or a future version could become so. But the main reason is what you say. Being polite in a conversation just feels like the right thing to me.

It's the same reason why I tend to be good to RPG NPCs, except if I'm purposefully role playing an evil character. But then it's not me doing the conversation, it's the character. When I'm identifying with the character, I'll always pick the polite option and feel bad if I mistreat an NPC, even if there's obviously no consciousness involved.

Re: Should We Respect LLMs? A Study on Influence of Prompt Politeness on Performance

#72

Post by prophesi »

The system prompt is usually poising them to act as a helpful assistant, and upholding the idea that they're being helpful makes sense for the LLM to carry out that task better.

It makes me wonder if you tell it that they're a disgruntled senior engineer if they'd perform better with a fellow snarky developer.

Re: Should We Respect LLMs? A Study on Influence of Prompt Politeness on Performance

#73

Post by zmgsabst »

deadbabe wrote: post #3

I’m totally against the anthropomorphization of LLMs. These are tools, not sentient beings. Treat them as such. Unlike a power tool, they don’t need respect because they cannot hurt you. LLMs trying to simulate human behavior is like the equivalent of skeuomorphism in UI design.

Polite but firm and direct works best in my experience — but as they emulate language responses, veering too far leads to either responses trying to engage emotionally (too rude) or failure to obey (too polite).

They don’t have emotions though, eg, you can say that ChatGPT is wrong and as long as you engage in a polite-but-firm tone, it’ll respond to the logical content.

Re: Should We Respect LLMs? A Study on Influence of Prompt Politeness on Performance

#74

Post by ben_w »

hbbio wrote: post #37
thatnerd wrote: post #4

Sam Altman doesn't want you to say "please" to ChatGPT. https://futurism.com/altman-please-thanks-chatgpt

From the article: "the impacts of generating a 100-word email. They found that just one email requires .14 kilowatt-hours worth of electricity, or enough to power 14 LED lights for an hour" Seems completely off the charts. A 70b model on my M3 Max laptop does it for 0.001 kWh... 140x times less that stated in the article. Let's say the OpenAI Nvidia clusters are less energy efficient than my Macbook... but not even s…

One can also work backwards, to see what kind of compute hardware they think must be needed for the models, or how much they think OpenAI's electricity costs.

100 words is ~133 tokens, so 0.14 kWh/133 tokens is about 1 kWh/kilo-token. If electricity is all from record-cheapest PV at $0.01/kWh, then this limits them to a price floor of $10/mega-token. For more realistic (but still cheap) pricing of $0.05/kWh, that's $50/mega-token. Here's the current price sheet: https://platform.openai.com/docs/pricing

To generate a 133-token email in, say, 5 seconds, if it takes 0.14 kWh, is 101 kW. This does not seem like a plausible number (caveat: I don't work in a data centre and what I think isn't plausible may just be wrong): https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=0.14+kWh+%2F+5+seconds+...

Re: Should We Respect LLMs? A Study on Influence of Prompt Politeness on Performance

#75

Post by Freak_NL »

causalmodels wrote: post #17

Personally I think people should generally be polite and respectful towards the models. Not because they have feelings, but because cruelty degrades those who practice it.

Computers exist to serve. Anthropomorphising them or their software programming is harmful¹. The tone of voice an officer would use to order a private or ranking to do something seems suitable — which obviously comes down to terse, clear, unambiguous queries and commands.

Besides, humans can switch contexts easily. I don't talk to my wife in the same way I do to a colleague, and I don't talk to a colleague like I would to a stranger, and that too depends on context (is it a friendly, neutral, or hostile encounter?).

1: At this point. I mean, we haven't even reached Kryten-level of computer awareness and intelligence yet, let alone Data.

Re: Should We Respect LLMs? A Study on Influence of Prompt Politeness on Performance

#76

Post by ionwake »

I actually disagree with being polite to LLMs.

The reason is soon there will come a time when people are pushing for AI to have "human" rights. This will naturally occur as poeple start to have relationships with them, and start to see them as better equals.

The problem with this is simply LLMs have no conscience. However humans will easily love them and be open to exploitation through dependance.

I believe it might even be imperative to be able to tell apart "word calculators" and animals, and keeping a line, even its through context switching to light verbal abuse to remind yourself they are not sentient, might be an important survival skill.

I am not trying to trigger anyone or be contrarian, does anyone sort of agree and or understand what I mean? Perhaps I havent explained myself well.

Re: Should We Respect LLMs? A Study on Influence of Prompt Politeness on Performance

#77

Post by ben_w »

eru wrote: post #60
ben_w wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, and this is also one of the points I make to anyone who appears to be in danger of taking Roko's basilisk seriously. There's plenty of other potential AI besides the one in ${insert thought experiment here}.

Roko's Basilisk is slightly cleverer. It gives you an incentive to build exactly Roko's Basilisk, thus making it more likely than the alternatives. I do agree that it seems that there's still something flawed with Roko's Basilisk. But it's not quite as simple as a vanilla Pascal's Wager.

Lots of things are close to Roko's Basilisk without being Roko's Basilisk, just like lots of things are close to being a safe and benevolent AI without being a safe and benevolent AI.

Or, to keep with the theological theme, how there's so many people insist on mutually incompatible variations of the Christian god (let alone the people who insist it's the same god as in Judaism and Islam).

Re: Should We Respect LLMs? A Study on Influence of Prompt Politeness on Performance

#78

Post by rsynnott »

lr4444lr wrote: post #20

There is a non-zero probability that malevolent AI in the future may judge me on my behavior toward their more primitive ancestors of today when deciding my fate. Doesn't hurt to be nice.

This is your mind on The Basilisk.

This has many of the same problems as Pascal's Wager (it's pretty much a variant on it); are you praying to the _right_ god? Do you correctly understand the god's motivations? Will it care at all about this, or might it instead be annoyed about you wasting tokens? Or that you didn't sell all your possessions to pay for more compute capacity?

And then of course there's the Terry Pratchett addendum to Pascal's Wager; your robo-god may resent being second-guessed:

> “This is very similar to the suggestion put forward by the Quirmian philosopher Ventre, who said, "Possibly the gods exist, and possibly they do not. So why not believe in them in any case? If it's all true you'll go to a lovely place when you die, and if it isn't then you've lost nothing, right?" When he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty-looking sticks and one of them said, "We're going to show you what we think of Mr Clever Dick in these parts...”

Re: Should We Respect LLMs? A Study on Influence of Prompt Politeness on Performance

#79

Post by zmgsabst »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #71
causalmodels wrote: post #17

Personally I think people should generally be polite and respectful towards the models. Not because they have feelings, but because cruelty degrades those who practice it.

Yes. I tend to be polite to LLMs. I admit that part of the reason is that I'm not 100% sure they're not conscious, or a future version could become so. But the main reason is what you say. Being polite in a conversation just feels like the right thing to me . It's the same reason why I tend to be good to RPG NPCs, except if I'm purposefully role playing an evil character. But then it's not me doing the conversation,…

I think we can look at examples:

People who are respectful of carved rocks, eg temple statues, tend to be generally respectful and disciplined people.

You become how you act.

Re: Should We Respect LLMs? A Study on Influence of Prompt Politeness on Performance

#80

Post by apercu »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #71
causalmodels wrote: post #17

Personally I think people should generally be polite and respectful towards the models. Not because they have feelings, but because cruelty degrades those who practice it.

Yes. I tend to be polite to LLMs. I admit that part of the reason is that I'm not 100% sure they're not conscious, or a future version could become so. But the main reason is what you say. Being polite in a conversation just feels like the right thing to me . It's the same reason why I tend to be good to RPG NPCs, except if I'm purposefully role playing an evil character. But then it's not me doing the conversation,…

That simply means you were raised right. :)
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