[ilitirit]

I've often wondered if LLMs can suffer from psychological abuse in symptomatic ways. Not literally of course, but for example, if you berate the LLM by calling it stupid, or useless, does that modify its behaviour negatively? Part of me think it does, but I don't really have any evidence for this. Maybe a fun weekend research topic.

[apsurd]

Semi-related, I'm always very put off by how people treat LLMs. Especially coders, seems an instinctive joy comes out to play God. The justification is usually that it's intentionally against the trap of anthropomorphizing, but no I can't help but suspect it's people getting off on power. It's weird.

I am always very cordial in my sessions. It's just more pleasant and it's a habit I want to habituate.

    Great work! 
    Now let's...
    Now can you help me...

[hbs18]

I think it's the same thing as showing mechanical sympathy towards other tools and objects. I've always slightly judged people on how hard they shut doors or how gentle they are with their cars.

[recursive]

You car door doesn't charge you a subscription or sell mined data or give advice generated inside an opaque machine with opaque influences. If I believed that my car door was phoning home like this, I would cut the wire or tape over the sensor. The metaphor doesn't really work too well.

I treat musical instruments with respect. But I might not if they were harvesting my data and trying to sell me subscriptions.

[fc417fc802]

> I am always very cordial in my sessions. It's just more pleasant and it's a habit I want to habituate.

I think it also produces better results. I have noticed that result quality is extremely sensitive to both the framing and tone of what I say. For example "X is the wrong approach, rework that" versus "will X have any performance implications". Personally I find that steering it towards an exploratory academic tone tends to produce better outcomes.

While unfortunate, I think that's more or less expected since much of the training data is human generated text. Looked at that way, would you rather contract the average regular on twitter or the average author of papers published in CS journals? (Somehow that ended up sounding eerily like summoning in a high fantasy setting.)

[apsurd]

Yes as a rule i've baked in a kind of expand and refine, expand and refine guidance for all sessions. I explicitly form the conversation around thought partnership, apply critical lens, audit, verify, scrutinize, research then recommend. and so on.

i also prompt for "seek out unknown unknowns that i wouldn't have included in my guidance".

This seems to be quite the opposite from some here on hn that take the agent-do-my-bidding approach.

I will say, my agentic workflow is about 70/30 split pure word discussions and plans vs code gen. So it makes sense for what i value.

[recursive]

I'm one of these. You might be right about some people, but not all of us.

I would prefer to not interact with them at all. But I've been asked to use them at work. For me, it's important to consistently remind myself that they are not people, and this is one of the ways I do it. There's a risk I might train myself to be a jerk in general. I blame the tool vendors for mimicking human speech patterns.

I find the whole thing distasteful, and there's certainly no joy. In fact, if I ever start to get a sensation of playing God, that would also represent a failure to me. I don't feel like a god when I set my thermostat. They are machines, that unfortunately, communicate superficially like humans.

[mycocola]

The similarity to human interaction is irrelevant.

No one apologises to a potato being peeled, nor compliments it for doing a great job being mashed.

[scotty79]

Neither apologies, nor complements affect the behavior of the potato. Words affect the behavior of and LLM.

[apsurd]

I'm willing to bet you've never sent a single word to a potato ever. And you send thousands to an llm.

This is not about llm sentience. this is about the habit and skill of communication.

[mycocola]

The comparison fails because I don't send numbers to my potatoes either, but I do send thousands to calculators without a please and thank you.

Practicing communications skills with LLMs I can get, but asserting that people who don't are playing god? Getting off on power?

[apsurd]

The criticism comes because people self-share how they berate the agents, argue and curse at them. It's right here in the comment section. one comment speaks of causing physical (simulated i guess) thousand year pain as a means of obedience.

it's weird.

[mycocola]

LLMs are not beings with thoughts or feelings, and if being mean to them were to somehow yield better results it would be no different than a cheat code in a game, or just constitute as clever use of game mechanics.

[elpocko]

The content of the session modifies the LLMs "behavior" (token selection) in one way or another during the session, obviously. The effects are localized to the session, they will degrade over time, they will not affect other users, and they are not permanent unless someone decides to finetune the model based on your unproductive interactions.

What actually happens when confronted with harsh negativity depends on the training of the model. Sanitized closed models will shut you down or get you banned. Community finetunes of open models might start begging you for more, daddy.