[stinkbeetle]

> 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.

[arjie]

It’s just the end_conversation tool probably: https://www.anthropic.com/research/end-subset-conversations

[jibal]

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.

[jibal]

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.

[stinkbeetle]

> 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?

[lukewarm707]

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.

[lanstin]

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”.

[lukewarm707]

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.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.11717

[stinkbeetle]

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.

[lukewarm707]

i don't decide for anyone, it's my view about it.

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).