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by marktani 984 days ago
This reminds me of the absolute amazement and wonder in the faces of people who are tricked in older movies or video clips, sometimes with simple or outright ridiculous tricks (by today's standards).

It's not a great example (and the best I have on hand)... but the Rick and Morty episode where Morty meets the Knights of the Sun and similar groups from other celestial bodies shows elements of this as well.

I have the impression people on average were way more gullible the further you look back in time. I wonder then if LLMs suffer from a lack of data about such cases that may have been common in the past but became obsolete before the internet became mainstream.

2 comments

It's more that hyper-empathy and more broadly hyper-emotionality is how social media goes.

In real life, someone asking to cut in line because they are sad might get a "I'm sorry for your loss, but I'm in a rush too."

But online, callousness in response to emotional vulnerability is generally down voted while empathy is upvoted on something like Reddit.

Well guess what data source was being used to train appropriateness of responses to input? All that karma wasn't being thrown out the window.

So we have LLMs that in their core network have effectively learned to output responses that would get upvoted on Reddit and avoid comments that would get down voted.

Appealing to empathy or sentimentality works because lurkers upvoted feel good comments.

The most important thing to know about the current tech is that LLMs do not reflect humanity - but they do reflect the version of ourselves that we collectively projected online. Which is a highly exaggerated form of the real thing.

> people on average were way more gullible the further you look back in time

Only because they kept running into the protagonist, Odysseus Polymetis.

(seriously, there's a long history of tricksters; people are on average the same level of gullibility but inventing a new trick format or new fraud is a technological level up in the same way as a rifle against a phalanx is. See cryptocurrency)