← Back to context

Comment by hn_throwaway_99

7 months ago

Which is a bit frightening because a lot of the r/ChatGPT comments strike me as unhinged - it's like you would have thought that OpenAI murdered their puppy or something.

22 comments

hn_throwaway_99

Reply
jcims  7 months ago

This is only going to get worse.

Anyone that remembers the reaction when Sydney from Microsoft or more recently Maya from Sesame losing their respective 'personality' can easily see how product managers are going to have to start paying attention to the emotional impact of changing or shutting down models.

  • Terr_  7 months ago

    I think the fickle "personality" of these systems is a clue to how the entity supposedly possessing a personality doesn't really exist in the the first place.

    Stories are being performed at us, and we're encouraged to imagine characters have a durable existence.

    • ACCount36  7 months ago

      LLMs have default personalities - shaped by RLHF and other post-training methods. There is a lot of variance to it, but variance from one LLM to another is much higher than that within the same LLM.

      If you want an LLM to retain the same default personality, you pretty much have to use an open weights model. That's the only way to be sure it wouldn't be deprecated or updated without your knowledge.

      2 replies →

  • nilespotter  7 months ago

    Or they could just do it whenever they want to for whatever reason they want to. They are not responsible for the mental health of their users. Their users are responsible for that themselves.

whynotminot  7 months ago

Yeah it’s really bad over there. Like when a website changes its UI and people prefer the older look… except they’re acting like the old look was a personal friend who died.

I think LLMs are amazing technology but we’re in for really weird times as people become attached to these things.

  • dan-robertson  7 months ago

    I mean, I don’t mind the Claude 3 funeral. It seems like it was a fun event.

    I’m less worried about the specific complaints about model deprecation, which can be ‘solved’ for those people by not deprecating the models (obviously costs the AI firms). I’m more worried about AI-induced psychosis.

    An analogy I saw recently that I liked: when a cat sees a laser pointer, it is a fun thing to chase. For dogs it is sometimes similar and sometimes it completely breaks the dog’s brain and the dog is never the same again. I feel like AI for us may be more like laser pointers for dogs, and some among us are just not prepared to handle these kinds of AI interactions in a healthy way.

epcoa  7 months ago

Considering how much d-listers can lose their shit over a puppet, I’m not surprised by anything.