Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by smusamashah 1149 days ago
Humans are not mere LLMs. But it's nice to think we are. May be we can program other humans with carefully constructed prompts alone. May be hypnosis is just a prompt injection attack.
5 comments

May be we can program other humans with carefully constructed prompts alone

Isn’t that what scammers, catfishers, con artists, and marketers do?

I mean, it's what parents TRY to do
It's also what makes a human. Without what parents "try to do" (teach the kids to human), the little people would just be like ferral animals, without language, human context, sense of society, and so on.
That's raises the interesting question of whether everything that makes us human is learned behavior.

If it all really is nurture rather than nature we're much more fragile than people may realize and only ever one generation away from going ferral

> only ever one generation away from going ferral

That doesn't seem right to me, as we cannot survive childhood without adults. Young humans are ready for life in society long before they are able to survive on their own without support from the society around them.

We have been depending on the continuation of some form of society for likely hundreds of thousands of years, not just for staying civilised but simply for survival.

Nurture vs nature is a wrong way to look at things. Without the human nature, the nurture would not work. Try to raise a member of a different species as a human...
Not to mention cult leaders.
No
> May be we can program other humans with carefully constructed prompts alone.

Is that not what reasoning is in a debate?

> May be hypnosis is just a prompt injection attack.

No need to go into hypnosis. Mere prompts can inject false memories. This has been proven multiple times [1].

[1] The Brain: The Story of You, David Eagleman.

The pseudo-science of NLP (_neuro-lingustic programming_) or "conversational hypnosis" is based on the believe that you _can_ program people with carefully constructed prompts alone. Not saying I _believe_ NLP to be valid (_hence the pseudo-science callout_) but I did fall down the Milton H Erickson wormhole 10-20yrs ago so can't say I never fell for it myself.
The real NLP is getting people to believe in NLP
... and that you can do this over the course of a few minutes or hours, without the subject noticing or objecting.
So, what was previously called 'persuading'.
I do feel like a stage hypnotist when prompt engineering an LLM!
... or a cable TV