Thread

1. probably_wrong · 1789742397 · focus · HN ↗

   First, to get it out of the way: I'm seeing comments here that clearly haven't read the article. I encourage you all to do that.

   I feel the article gets it right when suggesting it's the amount of (not always accurate!) data they can throw at you. In an honest discussion there's an assumption that the other person won't straight up lie to me so if someone shows me ten examples for why my argument is wrong I may be inclined to believe them. But if half of those examples are made up, well, that's a different story.

   I still think of the commenter here who said "LLMs are a DDOS on free resources" and I feel the comparison works here. If police officers can overwhelm innocent people into confessing, then so can an LLM that "can't be bargained with, can't be reasoned with, doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear! And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are"... convinced.

   1. skybrian · 1789757147 · focus · HN ↗

      You can always walk away from an online conversation. There's a form of relentlessness, but it's more that an LLM is patient enough to debate you for as long as you wish to keep going.

      1. QuadmasterXLII · 1789757955 · focus · HN ↗

         When maliciously convincing a person of a point, a huge fraction of the effort in every sentence goes into convincing the mark to listen to the next sentence. Individuals certainly can walk away at any point, but populations do and don't respond to tricks in this direction, and any engagement tricks that work generalize to any point of contention. Lots of avenues to this, from scientology's fortune telling to timeshare's trapped presentations. RL on engagement was the first billion dollar use of deep reinforcement learning!

         Would you like to hear more examples of humans using these techniques?

         1. skybrian · 1789781343 · focus · HN ↗

            Not really, but point taken :-)

            I'd be more interested in reading about the techniques that the chatbots were using in this study, to see if they are descending into dark patterns or not.

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