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GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT

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Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT

#751

Post by amosjyng »

dns_snek wrote: post #737
amosjyng wrote: post #726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs encourage people's delusions by default, it's just a question of how receptive you are to them There are absolutely plenty of people who encourage others' flat earth delusions by default, it's just a question of how receptive you are to them. > There is no good that comes from having all of your perspective distortions validated as facts. They turn into outright delusions without external grounding. Again, tha…

> If you don't like an LLM, then don't interact with it, just as you wouldn't interact with a human you dislike. It's not a matter of liking or disliking something. It's a question of whether that thing is going to heal or destroy your psyche over time. You're talking about personal responsibility while we're talking about public policy. If people are using LLMs as a substitute for their closest friends and therapist…

> We need to know whether we should be strongly discouraging it before it becomes another public health disaster.

That's fair! However, I think PSAs on the dangers of AI usage are very different in reach and scope from legally making LLM providers responsible for the AI usage of their users, which is what I understood jsrozner to be saying.

Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT

#752

Post by amosjyng »

krapp wrote: post #728
amosjyng wrote: post #726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs encourage people's delusions by default, it's just a question of how receptive you are to them There are absolutely plenty of people who encourage others' flat earth delusions by default, it's just a question of how receptive you are to them. > There is no good that comes from having all of your perspective distortions validated as facts. They turn into outright delusions without external grounding. Again, tha…

>Why are we holding LLMs to a higher standard than humans? If you don't like an LLM, then don't interact with it, just as you wouldn't interact with a human you dislike. We're not holding LLMs to a higher standard than humans, we're holding them to a different standard than humans because - and it's getting exhausting having to keep pointing this out - LLMs are not humans. They're software. And we don't have a choice…

> LLMs are not humans. They're software.

Sure, but the specific context of this conversation are the human roles (taxi driver, friend, etc.) that this software is replacing. Ergo, when judging software as a human replacement, it should be compared to how well humans fill those traditionally human roles.

> And we don't have a choice not to interact with LLMs because apparently we decided that these things are going to be integrated into every aspect of our lives whether we like it or not.

Fair point.

> And yes, in that inevitable future the fact that every piece of technology is a sociopathic P-zombie designed to hack people's brain stems and manipulate their emotions and reasoning in the most primal way possible is a problem.

Fair point again. Thanks for helping me gain a wider perspective.

However, I don't see it as inevitable that this becomes a serious large-scale problem. In my experience, current GPT 5.1 has already become a lot less cloyingly sycophantic than Claude is. If enough people hate sycophancy, it's quite possible that LLM providers are incentivized to continue improving on this front.

> We tend not to accept that kind of behavior in other people

Do we really? Maybe not third party bystanders reacting negatively to cult leaders, but the cult followers themselves certainly don't feel that way. If a person freely chooses to seek out and associate with another person, is anyone else supposed to be responsible for their adult decisions?

Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT

#753

Post by sho »

larodi wrote: post #392
sho wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of this is even close to true.

Can you prove your statement?

Of course I can't "prove" it, just like you can't "prove" yours, but I am involved in the field and no-one I know thinks we're even close to a "dead end". On the contrary, people are more bullish than ever.

I don't have any inside knowledge of OpenAI's product release priorities, but your narrative about dead ends and desperate scrambles to push something out the door, tricking investors to keep the party going - this has nothing to do with reality as far as I can tell.

Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT

#754

Post by bongodongobob »

antegamisou wrote: post #718
bongodongobob wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know I'm personally just tired of trying to converse with people with heads in the sand. AI saves me shit tons of time daily. If they can't figure it out, so be it. The level of absolute denial in HN AI threads is bizarre. One guess is that hacker nerds have their entire personality tied to being a smart haxor. That is being commoditized and they are getting defensive about it. It's telling that the image/video AI…

Not everyone writes trivial frontend or sysadmins for a living.

Far less have jobs that AI can't help with.

Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT

#755

Post by GreenWatermelon »

qwertytyyuu wrote: post #288
saaaaaam wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just cannot imagine myself sitting just “chatting away” with an AI. It makes me feel quite sick to even contemplate it. Another person I was talking to recently kept referring to ChatGPT as “she”. “She told me X”, “and I said to her…” Very very odd, and very worrying. As you say, a big education problem. The interesting thing is that a lot of these people are folk who are on the edges of digital literacy - people w…

is it that bad? I have a robot vacuum, i put googley eyes on it gave it a name, and now everyone in the house uses the name an uses he/him to refer to it.

The Robot Vacuum has infinitely more agency than chatbots. It moves, performs real non-virtual tasks, and keeps your home clean.

Even a rock has more personality and humanity than a chatbot. More useful too, since you can throw ot at your enemies to impede them. Can't say the same about a chatbot.

Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT

#758

Post by mips_avatar »

gilfoy wrote: post #569
mips_avatar wrote: post #269

I wish chatgpt would stop saying things like "here's a no nonsense answer" like maybe just don't include nonsense in the answer?

It might actually help output answer with less nonsense. As an example in some workflow I ask chatgpt to figure out if the user is referring to a specific location and output a country in json like { country } It has some error rate at this task. Asking it for a rationale improves this error rate to almost none. { rationale, country }. However reordering the keys like { country, rationale } does not. You get the wron…

But if it’s going to give itself a little pep talk can’t it just do that in a thinking token?

Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT

#759

Post by cpill »

dkersten wrote: post #576

I don’t want more conversational, I want more to the point. Less telling me how great my question is, less about being friendly, instead I want more cold, hard, accurate, direct, and factual results. It’s a machine and a tool, not a person and definitely not my friend.

Thats what they said about the Cylons until they started to have babies with them ...

Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT

#760

Post by cpill »

film42 wrote: post #621
dkersten wrote: post #576

I don’t want more conversational, I want more to the point. Less telling me how great my question is, less about being friendly, instead I want more cold, hard, accurate, direct, and factual results. It’s a machine and a tool, not a person and definitely not my friend.

It's a cash grab. More conversational AI means more folks running out of free or lower paid tier tokens faster, leading to more upsell opportunities. API users will pay more in output tokens by default. Example, I asked Claude a high level question about p2p systems and it started writing code in 3 languages. Ignoring the code, asking a follow up about the fundamentals, it answered and then rewrote the code 3 times.…

I think the cash grab is that by far the biggest use case for these models is personal relationship. Chai AI is doing more tokens per month than Anthropic all together and its just personal relationships.
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