Making AI chatbots friendly leads to mistakes and support of conspiracy theories • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by awakeasleep » Fri, May 01, 2026, 6:12 PM UTC

dgellow wrote: post #71

awakeasleep wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, it works perfectly for text based interactions, but if you try to do the thing where you can have a voice conversation with the robot, it doesn't seem to do much.

As a result I only try that voice once per new model release.

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

#82

Post by danielmarkbruce » Fri, May 01, 2026, 9:16 PM UTC

miyoji wrote: post #12

krunck wrote: 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. If I had a nickel for every time someone on HN responded to a criticism of LLMs with a vapid and fallacious whataboutist variation of "humans do that too!", I could fund my own AI lab. > Why does this surprise us? No one said they were surprised.

Most of the statements about humans doing the thing the LLM does are both meaningful and factual. They are meaningful because people call such things out as evidence of LLMs being stupid, and they are factual because in many cases humans do the thing.

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

#83

Post by danielmarkbruce » Fri, May 01, 2026, 9:20 PM UTC

emp17344 wrote: post #35

Terr_ wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case I think parent-poster is trying to explain a phenomenon, rather than downplay the problem.

But it’s actively unhelpful in explaining the phenomenon, as there is no justification for equivocating LLM and human behavior. It’s just confusing and misleading.

This is obviously wrong. LLMs are trained on material humans created. Everything they output is a result of a human input, even if not a direct result.