Comment by krapp
3 months ago
>Why are we holding LLMs to a higher standard than humans? If you don't like an LLM, then don't interact with it, just as you wouldn't interact with a human you dislike.
We're not holding LLMs to a higher standard than humans, we're holding them to a different standard than humans because - and it's getting exhausting having to keep pointing this out - LLMs are not humans. They're software.
And we don't have a choice not to interact with LLMs because apparently we decided that these things are going to be integrated into every aspect of our lives whether we like it or not.
And yes, in that inevitable future the fact that every piece of technology is a sociopathic P-zombie designed to hack people's brain stems and manipulate their emotions and reasoning in the most primal way possible is a problem. We tend not to accept that kind of behavior in other people, because we understand the very real negative consequences of mass delusion and sociopathy. Why should we accept it from software?
> LLMs are not humans. They're software.
Sure, but the specific context of this conversation are the human roles (taxi driver, friend, etc.) that this software is replacing. Ergo, when judging software as a human replacement, it should be compared to how well humans fill those traditionally human roles.
> And we don't have a choice not to interact with LLMs because apparently we decided that these things are going to be integrated into every aspect of our lives whether we like it or not.
Fair point.
> And yes, in that inevitable future the fact that every piece of technology is a sociopathic P-zombie designed to hack people's brain stems and manipulate their emotions and reasoning in the most primal way possible is a problem.
Fair point again. Thanks for helping me gain a wider perspective.
However, I don't see it as inevitable that this becomes a serious large-scale problem. In my experience, current GPT 5.1 has already become a lot less cloyingly sycophantic than Claude is. If enough people hate sycophancy, it's quite possible that LLM providers are incentivized to continue improving on this front.
> We tend not to accept that kind of behavior in other people
Do we really? Maybe not third party bystanders reacting negatively to cult leaders, but the cult followers themselves certainly don't feel that way. If a person freely chooses to seek out and associate with another person, is anyone else supposed to be responsible for their adult decisions?