Comment by theanonymousone
1 day ago
I have always said please and thank you to LLMs, not to increase accuracy or because I'm stupid. I believe it is more about me than about the LLM, and this is anyway a habit I don't want to lose.
1 day ago
I have always said please and thank you to LLMs, not to increase accuracy or because I'm stupid. I believe it is more about me than about the LLM, and this is anyway a habit I don't want to lose.
Thomas Aquinas believed cruelty to animals was wrong not because animals have souls (and with that all the standard moral rights), but because it can teach us cruelty to other humans.
Snarky morning: "spiritual souls" as opposed to "mere animal souls". Sorry, could not control myself.
Spiritual or not, anyone watching cattle in an abatoir will recognize symptoms of the kind of foreboding that I would suffer prior to execution.
Genuine question: do you add 'please' and 'thank you' to Google searches? If not, what sets them apart?
Google searches being keyword based, rather than simulated conversations?
The same reason you wouldn't put in an entire actual question/sentence, unless you either don't know how to use Google, are pissed off, or have an actual reason to suspect that it would yield proper hits (e.g. looking up an excerpt).
Google has been optimized for sentence like questions so much that for a good 6+ years now it has been completely useless as keyword search.
To clarify: sentence search got slightly better at the cost of keyword search. So the result is unusable garbage.
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Genuine question: do you write Google search queries in natural language?
I didn't used to but I do now that the searches go straight to an LLM. I almost always find the model output to be much more useful than the list of search results.
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Google isn’t conversational.
I searched for "Hey Google" and got this in response:
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llms seem more human like so if you were to treat them badly then you are more likely to condition yourself to treat other living creatures badly.
I also remember reading a long time ago someone who wrote that they wanted to be polite to an LLM because after they prompted it to learn about whether politeness was good for improving accuracy of responses, they got a message that led them to conclude that politeness could probably help. It seems a bit odd then because I have heard so much about how people use LLMs' responses about themselves to learn about LLMs themselves, but that seems like it is a suspicious approach.
Is it worth getting worse results for that reason? From the article:
"Contrary to expectations, impolite prompts consistently outperformed polite ones, with accuracy ranging from 80.8% for Very Polite prompts to 84.8% for Very Rude prompts. These findings differ from earlier studies that associated rudeness with poorer outcomes, suggesting that newer LLMs may respond differently to tonal variation. "
I am not polite to LLMs because I do not want to anthropomorphise them.
I guess it's about habit. In the end you are communicating. If I get into the habit of being rude while communicating with a machine, I would be afraid of this habit spilling over to my communication with other humans.
What about the risk that talking to a machine as though its human leads to thinking of it has human? That leads down a lot of dangerous paths.
> Is it worth getting worse results for that reason?
> accuracy ranging from 80.8% for Very Polite prompts to 84.8% for Very Rude prompts
I can live with that, for now at least.
There's also awareness of the basilisk...
Me too! You've said exactly what I was about to say. Anyone else feel that way?