6 ms·

The exact words matter to people who people who don’t use it to write for them. A lot of people use Claude as a friend/therapist/romantic partner/etc. That’s wh

The exact words matter to people who people who don’t use it to write for them. A lot of people use Claude as a friend/therapist/romantic partner/etc. That’s who I imagine would be most affected

nemo 1mo ago
>A lot of people use Claude as a friend/therapist/romantic partner People developing a para-social (pseudo-social?) relationship with a corporate robot have far bigger problems than the word-chooser in their robot "friend".
- summarybot 1mo ago
  Very intelligent people need intelligent-others to bounce ideas off of, and the LLM can be that.
  - Helloworldboy 1mo ago
    [dead]
  - kergonath 1mo ago
    Very intelligent people should be able to grasp that a LLM is not intelligent.
    - sailfast 1mo ago
      Have you tried to "rubber duck" an idea with an LLM. The latest models are pretty damnably good at it.
      - kergonath 1mo ago
        I have, and I still do this occasionally. I don’t believe the plant on my desk (I don’t have a rubber duck) is intelligent. I don’t need it to be intelligent, either. I also do it with a LLM every now and then and, while it’s feedback is more useful than a toy’s, it does not need to be intelligent either.
  - nemo 1mo ago
    Yes, I use LLMs this way, they're not friends, not therapists, not persons, they're tools, like a word/language calculator.
  - mossTechnician 1mo ago
    Even intelligent people have demonstrated they are not immune to the damaging effects of AI sycophancy. The most recent example that comes to mind is Hank Green.
kergonath 1mo ago
> The exact words matter to people who people who don’t use it to write for them. Right. If the exact words matter, using a non-deterministic LLM is a terrible idea in the first place. I hope these people never try putting the same prompt in different sessions. Also, now I am curious. How would these people interact with other humans? Is there anyone on earth who would provide the exact same reply, down to every single word, if we asked them the same question more than once?
pjc50 1mo ago
How would you ever know if you've been affected? How, indeed, would you know at all whether the word you get next is different from some different word next?
tmp10423288442 1mo ago
LLMs never are limited to "exact words", because their output is inherently probabilistic. The method Anthropic (along with Gemini, who has been using the exact same watermark for at least a year) uses doesn't bias the output token distribution, just reseeds the PRNG in a way that can be detected after the fact: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-text-watermark#which-specific-method-of-watermarking-do-you-use https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-text-watermark#which-s...
0-_-0 1mo ago
Affected by what exactly?

The exact words matter to people who people who don’t use it to write for them. A lot of people use Claude as a friend/therapist/romantic partner/etc. That’s who I imagine would be most affected

nemo 1mo ago

>A lot of people use Claude as a friend/therapist/romantic partner People developing a para-social (pseudo-social?) relationship with a corporate robot have far bigger problems than the word-chooser in their robot "friend".

summarybot 1mo ago
Very intelligent people need intelligent-others to bounce ideas off of, and the LLM can be that.
- Helloworldboy 1mo ago
  [dead]
- kergonath 1mo ago
  Very intelligent people should be able to grasp that a LLM is not intelligent.
  - sailfast 1mo ago
    Have you tried to "rubber duck" an idea with an LLM. The latest models are pretty damnably good at it.
    - kergonath 1mo ago
      I have, and I still do this occasionally. I don’t believe the plant on my desk (I don’t have a rubber duck) is intelligent. I don’t need it to be intelligent, either. I also do it with a LLM every now and then and, while it’s feedback is more useful than a toy’s, it does not need to be intelligent either.
- nemo 1mo ago
  Yes, I use LLMs this way, they're not friends, not therapists, not persons, they're tools, like a word/language calculator.
- mossTechnician 1mo ago
  Even intelligent people have demonstrated they are not immune to the damaging effects of AI sycophancy. The most recent example that comes to mind is Hank Green.

kergonath 1mo ago

> The exact words matter to people who people who don’t use it to write for them. Right. If the exact words matter, using a non-deterministic LLM is a terrible idea in the first place. I hope these people never try putting the same prompt in different sessions. Also, now I am curious. How would these people interact with other humans? Is there anyone on earth who would provide the exact same reply, down to every single word, if we asked them the same question more than once?

pjc50 1mo ago

How would you ever know if you've been affected? How, indeed, would you know at all whether the word you get next is different from some different word next?

tmp10423288442 1mo ago

LLMs never are limited to "exact words", because their output is inherently probabilistic. The method Anthropic (along with Gemini, who has been using the exact same watermark for at least a year) uses doesn't bias the output token distribution, just reseeds the PRNG in a way that can be detected after the fact: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-text-watermark#which-specific-method-of-watermarking-do-you-use https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-text-watermark#which-s...

0-_-0 1mo ago

Affected by what exactly?