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by alec_irl 374 days ago
> how you copied that long text from your distraught girlfriend and asked it for some response ideas

good lord, if tech were ethical then there would be mandatory reporting when someone consults an LLM to tell them how they should be responding to their intimate partner. are your skills of expression already that hobbled by chat bots?

2 comments

> are your skills of expression already that hobbled by chat bots?

You have it backwards. My skills of expression were hobbled by my upbringing, and others' thoughts on self-expression allowed my skills to flourish. I wish I had a chat bot to help me understand interpersonal communication because I could have actually had good examples growing up.

Although I'm in a similar boat as you, I don't think access to ChatGPT would have helped because it's still much too sycophantic to tell people the kinds of things they need to hear in order to learn interpersonal skills.

If you use ChatGPT like people use /r/AmITheAsshole, you'll never get a YTA.

These are just concrete examples to get the imagination going, not an exhaustive list of the ways that you are revealing your true self in the folds of your LLM chat history.

Note that it doesn't have to go all the way to "he gets Claude to help him win text arguments with his gf" for an uncomfortable amount of your self to be revealed by the chats.

There is always something icky about someone observing messages you wrote in privacy, and you don't have to have particularly unsavory messages for it to be icky. Why is that?

i don't personally see messages with an LLM as being different from, say, terminal commands. it's a machine interface. it sounds like you're anthropomorphizing the chat bot, if you're talking to it like you would a human then i would be more worried about the implications that has for you as a person.
Focusing on how you anthropomorphize the LLM isn't really interacting with the point since it was one example.

Might someone's google search history be embarrassing even though they don't treat google like a human?

What does this comment add to the conversation? It feels like an personal attack with no real rebuttal. People with anthropomorphise them all talk to them, the human-like interface is the entire selling point.
Do you think there is nothing private about your terminal commands? Would you be 100% ok with bash sending all of your command lines to a corporation with a database?