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

theguardian.com

71–80 of 83 posts

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

#71

I really wish they'd stop trying to suck up to me--all the "that's a really insightful question!" stuff. I'm one of those aspy people who immediately don't trust other humans who try to fluff up my ego. Don't like it from a chatbot either. But the fact that all the chatbots do it means that most people really crave that ego reinforcement.

You can already fix this in ChatGPT. Settings > Personalization: 1. Base Style & Tone: Efficient 2. Warmth: Less 3. Enthusiastic: Less I am amazed that people can use it at all without these changes.

Does that work in your experience? From what I see after a few rounds they go back to being incredibly annoying.

I dealt with frustrating software ,y whole life but LLMs are the only type that make me what to scream at it from actual anger

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

#72
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…

Being polite, having decorum and respect for others has nothing to do with being able to have hard conversations with people. It’s just leadership.

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

#73
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…

> When society pressures people to be "more friendly", eg. "less toxic" they lose their ability to tell hard truths and to call out those who hold erroneous views.

I see people being incredibly toxic on the internet every day. Including under their own names. Sometimes even on their own social network.

Whenever I head "hard truths" in that context I'm very suspicious about what is actually meant.

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

#74
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think Big5 applies to LLMs. They don't share people's morality or common sense, and the traits are predicated on that. BTW: https://claude.ai/share/78a13035-0787-42a5-8643-398b26887e42

Lol, you convinced a LLM to agree with you. I use the Big5 as a way of communicating where there is a common reference and a large body of work. How people think they think and how they actually think are two different things, people are much closer to LLMs than they think they are. I can't provide evidence for this for a variety of reasons so at this point we're just going to have to agree to disagree.

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

#75
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?

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?

Try it yourself with a roundtable discussion: https://opper.ai/ai-roundtable/questions/can-billionaires-an...

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

#76
post #24

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…

What you're saying sounds pretty cool but can you give some examples? Is this what you're talking about? https://chatgpt.com/share/69f246e5-e0e8-83ea-aa88-6d0024b915...

yea this is a good example, its the nature of sort of how you salt the prompt -- regardless of any baseline truth it will search the various manifolds mathematically closest to the order and type of words you put in. It will do that always and willingly. Thats what the technology does.

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

#77
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Big5 applies to LLMs. They don't share people's morality or common sense, and the traits are predicated on that. BTW: https://claude.ai/share/78a13035-0787-42a5-8643-398b26887e42

Lol, you convinced a LLM to agree with you. I use the Big5 as a way of communicating where there is a common reference and a large body of work. How people think they think and how they actually think are two different things, people are much closer to LLMs than they think they are. I can't provide evidence for this for a variety of reasons so at this point we're just going to have to agree to disagree.

Actually, it's the other way around - I used LLM to think about it independently to check if my intuition made sense.

I agree with its arguments (and I generally found LLMs argue better than myself, that's why I use them).

It's disappointing that you dismiss it without providing a counterargument.

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

#78

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

What is now, cow?

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

#79
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…

> People aren't much different Yes they are. There is absolutely zero evidence that friendlier humans are more prone to mistakes or conspiracy theories. However, even if that were true, LLMs are not humans, anthropomorphizing them is not a helpful way to think about them.

The claim isn't friendly are more prone, it's that they don't push back. Thus idiots with conspiracy theories think people agree with them, validating their ideas.

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

#80
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, you convinced a LLM to agree with you. I use the Big5 as a way of communicating where there is a common reference and a large body of work. How people think they think and how they actually think are two different things, people are much closer to LLMs than they think they are. I can't provide evidence for this for a variety of reasons so at this point we're just going to have to agree to disagree.

Actually, it's the other way around - I used LLM to think about it independently to check if my intuition made sense. I agree with its arguments (and I generally found LLMs argue better than myself, that's why I use them). It's disappointing that you dismiss it without providing a counterargument.

I have privileged access to information that I cannot share, I would rather keep my access than win some argument online.
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