[Sharlin]

More interesting, IMO, is the general trend that started long before LLMs. The fact that "dump them" is the standard answer to any relationship question is a meme by now. The LLMs appear to be doing exactly what one would expect them to be doing based on their training corpus.

[doubled112]

"There is more than one fish in the sea" has been relationship advice for centuries. It might be about being dumped, but I've also thought it useful for considering dumping somebody too.

[Sharlin]

No, that's not it. We're talking about posts like "we had a silly little quarrel about something that would need fifteen minutes to clear up and make both happy if we both just try to adult a bit" and commenters being adamant that deleting gym and facebooking up and so on is clearly the only choice. Most of said commenters probably not being in any position to give advice on relationships to others.

[astrange]

> The LLMs appear to be doing exactly what one would expect them to be doing based on their training corpus.

That is not how full LLM training works. That is how base model pretraining works.

[Sharlin]

Yes, yes, I know. But how many people have AI companies hired to do RLHF who actually have the expertise to adjust them away from biases like this? As opposed to paying a dollar per day to a bunch of poor people in Africa?

[dec0dedab0de]

if things are so bad that you’re posting on reddit then breaking up is usually the best answer.

[nibbleyou]

I see this being said often but I don't understand.

A lot of people posting there are young and may well be in their first relationship. It makes sense for them to ask a question in the community they spend their most time in - which is reddit

[the_af]

Most people overshare on reddit and it's completely unrelated to the seriousness of the situation.

It's also a meme that people will ask the dumbest, most trivial interpersonal conflict questions on Reddit that would be easily solved by just talking to the other person. E.g. on r/boardgames, "I don't like to play boardgames but my spouse loves them, what can I do?" or "someone listens to music while playing but I find it distracting, what can I do?" (The obvious answer of "talk to the other person and solve it like grownups" is apparently never considered).

On relationship advice, it often takes the form "my boy/girlfriend said something mean to me, what shall I do?" (it's a meme now that the answer is often "dump them").

If LLMs train on this...

[est]

the year is 2015

smart phones took over the world, social networks happened.

Turns out they are the best sterializer human ever invented.

I just wrote a blog https://blog.est.im/2026/stdin-09

[1970-01-01]

This is the correct take. The advice preceded the LLM boom. They were trained on the 'dump them' advice and proceeded to reinforce the take. So why did the relationship advice change dramatically? I speculate attribution to the disinformation campaigns during this time. They were and still are grossly underestimated.

[to11mtm]

Not sure what sorts of disinformation campaigns you're referring to...

There is something more interesting to consider however; the graph starts to go up in 2013, less than 6 months after the release of Tinder.

[1970-01-01]

These. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_disinformation#Social_...