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. pixl97 · 1789743062 · focus · HN ↗

      >In an honest discussion there's an assumption that the other person won't straight up lie

      The particular problem with honest discussions is you are the only agent that you can be sure is having one. Honest discussion is formulated on trust and trust, as we are learning, is a very difficult thing to establish. For example, in my view anything involving advertising is likely a lie, or at least likely adversarial to my wishes. On the internet itself conversations are much more likely to drift into the adversarial too. Some of this could just be dialectic, but most often it's emotional investment by the other speaker. Also, even pre-AI the internet is a bullshit generation machine. We take all of our politics, advertising, and human stochastic parrots that are stuck on an infinitely running prompt then bundle up all this data and train AI on it, and wonder why AI acts like us.

      1. titanomachy · 1789749844 · focus · HN ↗

         Most of my conversations are with coworkers or friends. In both cases there are pretty significant consequences for being caught in a lie, and the exchanges are mostly honest.

         1. ambicapter · 1789758842 · focus · HN ↗

            I find coworkers will massage the truth or stay as ambiguous as possible all the time, purely for CYA reasons.

            1. david-gpu · 1789771172 · focus · HN ↗

               Your company or team has a terrible culture. It is not like that everywhere.

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