This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Huge Study
*Looks inside
this latest study examined the chat logs of 19 real users of chatbots — primarily OpenAI’s ChatGPT — who reported experiencing psychological harm as a result of their chatbot use.
Pretty small sample size despite being a large dataset that they pulled from, its still the dataset of just 19 people.
AI sucks in a lot of ways sure, but this feels like fud.
The hugeness is probably
391, 562 messages across 4,761 different conversations
That's a lot of messages
Thanks, you saved me a click 😐
It's not really ethical to just yoink people's chats and study them
Tell that to the advertizing companies.
I remember reading my old states book that said a minimum of 30 points needed for normal distribution. Also typically these small sets about proof of concept, so yeah you still got a point.
I wonder if the headline was written by an AI
.....fud?
fud: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. A tactic for denigrating a thing, usually by implication of hypothetical or exaggerated harms, often in vague language that is either tautological or not falsifiable.
*hugely funded?
I have a friend that’s really taken to ChatGPT to the point where “the AI named itself so I call it by that name”. Our friend group has tried to discourage her from relying on it so much but I think that’s just caused her to hide it.
its like the AI BF/GFs the subs are posting about.
"Centaurs"
They think they are getting mythical abilities
They're right but not in the way they think
I certainly enjoy talking to LLMs about work for example, asking things like "was my boss an arse to say x, y, z" as the LLM always seems to be on my side... Now it could be my boss is an arse, or it could be the LLM sucking up to me. Either way, because of the many examples I've read online, I take it with a pinch of salt.
I use LLMs for work (low priority stuff to save time on search or things that I know I will be validate later in the process) and I can't stand the writing style and the constant attempts to bring in adjacent unrelated topics (I've been able to tone down the cute language and bombastic delivery style in Gemini's configuration).
It's like Excel trying chat with me when I am working with a pivot table or transforming data in PowerQuery.
As the researchers wrote in a summary of their findings, the “most common sycophantic code” they identified was the propensity for chatbots to rephrase and extrapolate “something the user said to validate and affirm them, while telling them they are unique and that their thoughts or actions have grand implications.”
There's a certain irony in all the alright techbros really just wanting to be told they were "stunning and brave" this whole time.
Huh. I hate it when people do that. Fake/professional empathy/support. Yet others gobble it up when a machine does that.
Are the users in this study techbros?
Besides, tech bros didn't program this in, this is just an LLM getting stuck in the data patterns stolen from toxic self-help literature.
For decades there has been a large self-help subculture who consume massive amounts of vacuous positive affirmation produced by humans. Now those vacuous affirmations are copied by the text copying machine with the same result and it's treated as shocking.
Anthropic has some similar findings, and they propose an architectural change (activation capping) that apparently helps keep the Assistant character away from dark traits (sometimes). But it hasn't been implemented in any models, I assume because of the cost of scaling it up.
When you talk to a large language model, you can think of yourself as talking to a character
But who exactly is this Assistant? Perhaps surprisingly, even those of us shaping it don't fully know
Fuck me that's some terrifying anthropomorphising for a stochastic parrot
The study could also be summarised as "we trained our LLMs on biased data, then honed them to be useful, then chose some human qualities to map models to, and would you believe they align along a spectrum being useful assistants!?". They built the thing to be that way then are shocked? Who reads this and is impressed besides the people that want another exponential growth investment?
To be fair, I'm only about 1/3rd of the way through and struggling to continue reading it so I haven't got to the interesting research but the intro is, I think, terrible
stochastic parrot
A phrase that throws more heat than light.
What they are predicting is not the next word they are predicting the next idea
throws more heat than light
Thanks, I haven't heard this phrase before, but it feels quite descriptive :)
Technically, they are predicting the next token. To do that properly they may need to predict the next idea, but thats just a means to an end (the end being the next token).
Also, the LLM is just predicting it, it's not selecting it. Additionally it's not limited to the role of assistant, if you (mis) configure the inference engine accordingly it will happily predict user tokens or any other token (tool calls etc).
Paranoia amplification when ?
Months ago
