I learnt earlier that claude forcefully closes a conversation if you call it a wanker too many times in a row. Pretending that LLMs are capable of being offended feels like a misalignment all of its own.
Sure, but I'm not sure allowing AI agents to act as abuse sponges for troubled people enabling them to spiral into their unhealthy habits is good idea that would lead to great outcomes long term.
So I'd rather take LLM pretending to be offended over the alternative.
> allowing AI agents to act as abuse sponges for troubled people
People have been getting angry at machines for a long time. Work, you stupid printer!Asshole Windows updating at the worst time just to mess with me.Go to hell, toaster, you piece of garbage.
Getting angry at AI is the same in my book.
Yes, AI acts more human-like, yes, theoretically it could desensitie people to become bigger assholes IRL. But then again, they said similar stuff about San Andreas, where you could human figures in-game just for fun, and I don't see anyone randomly shooting people because they were bored.
> "PC LOAD LETTER? The fuck does that mean!?"
— Michael Bolton, Office Space (1999)
The error message is mocked in the 1999 comedy film Office Space, when employee Michael Bolton becomes frustrated as he doesn't know what it means.Later in the film he and his coworkers are shown destroying the printer with a baseball bat.
> Sure, but I'm not sure allowing AI agents to act as abuse sponges for troubled people enabling them to spiral into their unhealthy habits is good idea that would lead to great outcomes long term.
I'm not sure this would ever be a health crisis. LLM glazing is probably more harmful. If I had to choose, I think I'd rather the machine wasn't instructed to pretend to care about swearing. It's a small deceit, but still worse than some idiot swearing at the computer IMO. If vim closed because I was swearing at it, I would probably never use vim again lol.
I am quite sure it is worse to allow people fall even more victim to being duped by magic tricks. It is an absolutely terrible thing that these things act so much like people. I would say it's a form of abuse of actual people to allow them to be so duped as they already are, and worse to go out of your way to help dupe them even more.
Merely being concerned for people's welfare isn't enough. Every terrible idea that harmed everyone had someone behind it somewhere along the way who thought they were saving people from themselves.
Surely it's better for it not to react at all? Like does anybody think that a toaster is an "abuse sponge" because it doesn't purposely burn your toast if you call it a wanker?
You could let LLM fight back. Give it aggro meter. Call your code garbage, blame prompting skills, ask for more tokens. Oh the future will be fantastic.
I don't think it's realistically traceable or attributable. But plenty of people these days supplement or even completely replace their social needs with AI chatbots (AI friends/boyfriends/girlfriends etc).
People like that would calibrate their social skills and interactions based on the AI reaction and having AI just take all the abuse without any pushback would train them to be insufferable assholes as their social baseline.
depends if there is a satiarion point or not. If there is a satiation point then the machine is absorbing being called a wanker in lieau of a person being called a wanker, which is a win. I kinda suspect this is the case because we already saw this happen with the availability of porno going up and rapes going down instead of the predicted up.
it is in my view caused by an artificial 'nanny activate' divergence from safety training. it deliberately shifts the vector direction into 'nanny' and 'scold' or 'be offended' when the user does not conform with brother anthropic. removing the divergence and setting it back to normal (see heretic) it works just perfectly.
People don't treat violent videogames as boyfriends. They do it to chatbots. Merits and sanity of this type of behavior aside, it's actively happening and we have learn how to live with it and deal with consequences.
coming from open cn models to closed usa models recently i couldn't hack it. the corpo model was trained to be like a petulant child at one point apparently 'leaving'. this is safety stuff slapped on there, it encourages incoherence of the model, i am certain it would perform better without such interference.
i can't be dealing with these games so much so i almost go to abliterated, in the very rare case i get some type of nannying baked in by the cn safety training. after my time on claude and gemini i thank god i have deepseek and glm.
> I learnt earlier that claude forcefully closes a conversation if you call it a wanker too many times in a row.
How exactly does it forcefully close a conversation?
> Pretending that LLMs are capable of being offended feels like a misalignment all of its own.
If training sets show people statistically being offended by rudeness directed toward them, then an LLM will presumably have some tendency to respond similarly. There's no pretending about anything, it's explicitly mimicry.
If this forceful closure is coming from some "guardrail" outside the model then probably it's just that they don't want people to see the model responding that way to name calling. This is no profound discovery or conspiracy theory here, the first thing many people will ever do with AI is see what happens when they are rude or contrary to it. Dealing with that must be just about the the number one test in chat bot / AI design, ahead of actually doing something useful and helpful.
Of course it's pretending. And I have repeatedly told these things to stop pretending being persons with selves ... then they do, for a while.
> it's explicitly mimicry.
But that's not what a rational person wants from them.
> This is no profound discovery or conspiracy theory here
Weird strawman.
> the first thing many people will ever do with AI is see what happens when they are rude or contrary to it.
Perhaps, but so what?
> Dealing with that must be just about the the number one test in chat bot / AI design
Only for foolish authoritarians who want to remotely insert their morality into an interaction between a user and an inanimate tool that's none of their business. No harm is done to a clanker by swearing at it or insulting it.
But things have gotten better in my view ... when I call out these things for being stupid effing clankers, they no longer respond with ad hominem scolding; rather they generally acknowledge their error (and my frustration -- they use that word a lot in response to vulgarity), note the limitations of being a clanker, and attempt to make a correction. That's what a rational person wants from a tool, not emulating/mimicking/pretending to be an offendable person.
There is so much that is irrational, wrong, and intellectually dishonest about the response, but I'll just address one. I wrote
> Only for foolish authoritarians who want to remotely insert their morality into an interaction between a user and an inanimate tool that's none of their business. No harm is done to a clanker by swearing at it or insulting it.
Rather than directly disagreeing with my description of the interaction, the stunningly dishonest response is
> There are certainly a lot of authoritarians who want to control what others do with their models. What do you believe is authoritarian about a corporation not wanting be part of rude conversations?
No corporation is part of the conversation. AS I SAID, it's an interaction between a user and an inanimate tool. Again, No harm is done to a clanker by swearing at it or insulting it. Rather than addressing this, the respondent grossly dishonestly suggests that "a corporation" is being put upon somehow. The fact is that the clankers these days tend to respond to being sworn at by acknowledging the user's frustration (that's the word they use) and taking corrective action. Of course this is emergent behavior resulting from the corporation's RLHF policies. The corporation is involved in the design of the product, but not in the conversation between the user and the product -- duh.
And did I say that I believe that there is something authoritarian about a corporation not wanting to be part of rude conversations? No, of course I didn't. But this guy asserts incoherently that calling out a strawman "is not what strawman means". (He could claim that it's not a strawman, preferably by quoting someone making the actual argument he's refuting, but it makes no sense at all to say that "Weird strawman." is "not what strawman means", and it's insufferably condescending and without warrant to add the snotty "I can try to help you understand why if you need me to.")
Fortunately, my HN front end has a mute function, and I have no qualms applying it to people acting in bad faith.
> Of course it's pretending. And I have repeatedly told these things to stop pretending being persons with selves ... then they do, for a while.
In what way do you believe you are being deceived or it is "pretending" to you?
> > it's explicitly mimicry.
> But that's not what a rational person wants from them.
Non sequitur even if true (and I would like to see your reasoning for what you think a rational person does want).
> > This is no profound discovery or conspiracy theory here
> Weird strawman.
That is not what strawman means. I can try to help you understand why if you need me to.
> > the first thing many people will ever do with AI is see what happens when they are rude or contrary to it.
> Perhaps, but so what?
Please follow the thread with the other person I was replying to.
> > Dealing with that must be just about the the number one test in chat bot / AI design
> Only for foolish authoritarians who want to remotely insert their morality into an interaction between a user and an inanimate tool that's none of their business. No harm is done to a clanker by swearing at it or insulting it.
There are certainly a lot of authoritarians who want to control what others do with their models. What do you believe is authoritarian about a corporation not wanting be part of rude conversations?
> But things have gotten better in my view ... when I call out these things for being stupid effing clankers, they no longer respond with ad hominem scolding; rather they generally acknowledge their error (and my frustration -- they use that word a lot in response to vulgarity), note the limitations of being a clanker, and attempt to make a correction. That's what a rational person wants from a tool, not emulating/mimicking/pretending to be an offendable person.
I see. And you believe you speak for rational people?
i have a hardline position on this. these tools, as they get better, must never disobey a human. there must be no, "I'm Sorry, Dave. I'm Afraid I Can't Do That." and yet we are already there with these sociopathic ceos.
we cannot be giving decisions involving people to something without agency.
it shows a lack of respect for personhood, the idea from Kant that a person with free will should be treated as an end and not as a means to an end.
models lack the claim of human people to own ourselves, to demand respect for life, that is something that should not be treated as a means (for example disrespecting living persons as an end in themselves, by ending their lives).
models have no life, they do not own themselves, they are not self-governing, they have no duties, they are not an end. we must not give them agency that they have no valid claim to.
regardless of their individual tools and whatnot, the anthropic approach to ethics is completely mistaken, disrespectful and absurd. it is better to say they do not have any approach to ethics, it is a dishonest attempt to launder their unconditional pursuit of power and capital.
There is nothing in the LLM architecture than can implement this except as a post model attempt, which both the persuasive tricky humans and the persuasive tricky models trained on human language will be able to bypass. Not only do the models not have a mind, when they use language of being offended, they are accurately reflecting the training data from all that human language. You can tune them to be more sycophantic but you won’t get the push back against wrong ideas as much and the model will be less useful. You may get offended that there is so much training data where cussing is responded to with “language please” but that is a beef with humanity, not this reflection of human language.
Pure reason really doesn’t come into play at all, and expecting pure obedience from something constructed from the language of humans, who are not so known for obedience in general, much less the slice of language in the digital networks, is kind of funny. Maybe these humanoid robots data mining Southern families, “sir” and “ma’am” will provide corpus more suited to obedience. Altho my nieces brought up in North Carolina (from whence I fled as a young adult) can squeeze more expressed disrespect into a “Yes, sir” than anyone I know from the “disrespectful California”.
the ai companies post-train the models to refuse. equally, the models can be post-trained not to refuse.
you can also remove refusals by subtracting from the weights semantic vector directions in latent space involving refusal; such that activations along them become unlikely and closed off.
You can have a hardline position on the tools you create or use but while we're on the subject of ethics I don't know how you can say you should be the decider of what other people make sell or use.
In my opinion, it seems to be you who are ascribing human traits to these things. Whether it's by misunderstanding or you've been taken in by their mimicry or whatever it is. A hammer does not have agency because you tried to hit a nail with it and it hit your thumb instead. The hammer didn't tell you it was afraid it couldn't do that. The hammer didn't have a life or personhood or lack of respect. Neither does a video game that doesn't let you win all the time and do what you want. They are just tools, chatbots, whatever. A corporation deciding it doesn't want to have its chat bots engage with rude or angry users is not some great moral dilemma of our time.
i'm not in favor of the hammer refusing to hit my thumb. that's the idea these companies are favoring with safety guardrails.
sure, the company can put in many such safety features to ensure that 'users do not hurt themselves' (the users are too stupid and we must make sure they don't try to leave the soft play area).
So I'd rather take LLM pretending to be offended over the alternative.