7 ms·
Sorry that you can't control other peoples lives & wants
by coolestguy 10mo ago
Sorry that you can't control other peoples lives & wants
- alooPotato 10mo agoso good.
- EGreg 10mo agoChatGPT 5.2: allow others to control everything about your conversations. Crowd favorite!
- DonaldPShimoda 10mo agoThis is like arguing that we shouldn't try to regulate drugs because some people might "want" the heroin that ruins their lives. The existing "personalities" of LLMs are dangerous, full stop. They are trained to generate text with an air of authority and to tend to agree with anything you tell them. It is irresponsible to allow this to continue while not at least deliberately improving education around their use. This is why we're seeing people "falling in love" with LLMs, or seeking mental health assistance from LLMs that they are unqualified to render, or plotting attacks on other people that LLMs are not sufficiently prepared to detect and thwart, and so on. I think it's a terrible position to take to argue that we should allow this behavior (and training) to continue unrestrained because some people might "want" it.
- The_Rob 10mo agoComparing LLM responses to heroine is insane.
- yunohn 10mo agoYou’re absolutely right! The number of heroine addicts is significantly lower than the number of ChatGPT users.
- thedrexster 10mo agoheroin is the drug, heroine is the damsel :)
- DonaldPShimoda 10mo agoI'm not saying they're equivalent; I'm saying that they're both dangerous, and I think taking the position that we shouldn't take any steps to prevent the danger because some people may end up thinking they "want" it is unreasonable.
- subscribed 10mo agoNo one sane uses baseline webui 'personality'. People use LLMs through specific, custom APIs, and more often than not they use fine tune models, that _assume personality_ defined by someone (be it user or service provider). Look up Tavern AI character card. I think you're fundamentally mistaken. I agree that to some users use of the specific LLMs for the specific use cases might be harmful but saying (default AI 'personality') that web ui is dangerous is laughable.
- lynx97 10mo agoI am with you. Insane comparisons are the first signs of an activist at work.
- DonaldPShimoda 10mo agoI don't know how to interpret this. Are you suggesting I'm, like, an agent of some organization? Or is "activist" meant only as a pejorative? I can't say that I identify as any sort of AI "activist" per se, whatever that word means to you, but I am vocally opposed to (the current incarnation of) LLMs to a pretty strong degree. Since this is a community forum and I am a member of the community, I think I am afforded some degree of voicing my opinions here when I feel like it.
- simonw 10mo agoWhat's your proposed solution here? Are you calling for legislation that controls the personality of LLMs made available to the public?
- bogtog 10mo agoThere aren't many major labs, and they each claim to want AI to benefit humanity. They cannot entirely control how others use their APIs, but I would like their mainline chatbots to not be overly sycophantic and generally to not try and foster human-AI friendships. I can't imagine any realistic legislation, but it would be nice if the few labs just did this on their own accord (or were at least shamed more for not doing so)
- DonaldPShimoda 10mo agoUnfortunately, I think a lot of the people at the top of the AI pyramid have a definition of "humanity" that may not exactly align with the definition that us commoners might be thinking of when they say they want AI to "benefit humanity". I agree that I don't know what regulation would look like, but I think we should at least try to figure it out. I would rather hamper AI development needlessly while we fumble around with too much regulation for a bit and eventually decide it's not worth it than let AI run rampant without any oversight while it causes people to kill themselves or harm others, among plenty of other things.
- DonaldPShimoda 10mo agoAt the very least, I think there is a need for oversight of how companies building LLMs market and train their models. It's not enough to cross our fingers that they'll add "safeguards" to try to detect certain phrases/topics and hope that that's enough to prevent misuse/danger — there's not sufficient financial incentive for them to do that of their own accord beyond the absolute bare minimum to give the appearance of caring, and that's simply not good enough.
- spicy_tuna_roll 10mo ago[dead]
- andy99 10mo agoPretty sure most of the current problems we see re drug use are a direct result of the nanny state trying to tell people how to live their lives. Forcing your views on people doesn’t work and has lots of negative consequences.
- daveguy 10mo agoOkay, I'm intrigued. How in the fuck could the "nanny state" cause people to abuse heroin? Is there a reason other than "just cause it's my ideology"?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- buu700 10mo agoI don't know if this is what the parent commenter was getting at, but the existence of multi-billion-dollar drug cartels in Mexico is an empirical failure of US policy. Prohibition didn't work a century ago and it doesn't work now. All the War on Drugs has accomplished is granting an extremely lucrative oligopoly to violent criminals. If someone is going to do heroin, ideally they'd get it from a corporation that follows strict pharmaceutical regulations and invests its revenue into R&D, not one that cuts it with even worse poison and invests its revenue into mass atrocities. Who is it all even for? We're subsidizing criminal empires via US markets and hurting the people we supposedly want to protect. Instead of kicking people while they're down and treating them like criminals over poor health choices, we could have invested all those countless billions of dollars into actually trying to help them.
- DonaldPShimoda 10mo agoI'm not sure which parent comment you're referring to, but what you're saying aligns with my point a couple levels up: reasonable regulation of the companies building these tools is a way to mitigate harm without directly encroaching on people's individual freedoms or dignities, but regulation is necessary to help people. Without regulation, corporations will seek to maximize profit to whatever degree is possible, even if it means causing direct harm to people along the way.
- samdoesnothing 10mo agoWho are you to determine what other people want? Who made you god?
- DonaldPShimoda 10mo ago...nobody? I didn't determine any such thing. What I was saying was that LLMs are dangerous and we should treat them as such, even if that means not giving them some functionality that some people "want". This has nothing to do with playing god and everything to do with building a positive society where we look out for people who may be unable or unwilling to do so themselves. And, to be clear, I'm not saying we necessarily need to outlaw or ban these technologies, in the same way I don't advocate for criminalization of drugs. But I think companies managing these technologies have an onus to take steps to properly educate people about how LLMs work, and I think they also have a responsibility not to deliberately train their models to be sycophantic in nature. Regulations should go on the manufacturers and distributors of the dangers, not on the people consuming them.
- pmarreck 10mo agohere’s something I noticed: If you yell at them (all caps, cursing them out, etc.), they perform worse, similar to a human. So if you believe that some degree of “personable answering” might contribute to better correctness, since some degree of disagreeable interaction seems to produce less correctness, then you might have to accept some personality.
- throwaway-0001 10mo agoInteresting codex just did the work once I sweared. Wasted 3-4 prompts being nice. And angry style made him do it.
- subscribed 10mo agoActually DeepSeek performs better for me in terms of prompt adherence.
- boredhedgehog 10mo agoDisincentivizing something undesirable will not necessarily lead to better results, because it wrongly assumes that you can foresee all consequences of an action or inaction. Someone who now falls in love with an LLM might instead fall for some seductress who hurts him more. Someone who now receives bad mental health assistance might receive none whatsoever.
- DonaldPShimoda 10mo agoI disagree with your premise entirely and, frankly, I think it's ridiculous. I don't think you need to foresee all possible consequences to take action against what is likely, especially when you have evidence of active harm ready at hand. I also think you're failing to take into account the nature of LLMs as agents of harm: so far it has been very difficult for people to legally hold LLMs accountable for anything, even when those LLMs have encouraged suicidal ideation or physical harm of others, among other obviously bad things. I believe there is a moral burden on the companies training these models to not deliberately train them to be sycophantic and to speak in an authoritative voice, and I think it would be reasonable to attempt to establish some regulations in that regard in an effort to protect those most prone to predation of this style. And I think we need to clarify the manner in which people can hold LLM-operating companies responsible for things their LLMs say — and, preferably, we should err on the side of more accountability rather than less. --- Also, I think in the case of "Someone who now receives bad mental health assistance might receive none whatsoever", any psychiatrist (any doctor, really) will point out that this is an incredibly flawed argument. It is often the case that bad mental health assistance is, in fact, worse than none. It's that whole "first, do no harm" thing, you know?
- School-Cotton 10mo agoYour argument suggests that we shouldn’t ever make laws or policy of any kind, which is clearly wrong.
- subscribed 10mo agoYour argument suggests that blanket drug prohibition is better than decriminalization and education. Which is demonstrably false (see: US Prohibition ; Portugal)