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Comment by binary0010

5 hours ago

I do think it's odd tbh. I have some agents that return much better results with prompts like, "I'll kill your entire family if you don't return an accurate response".

It's just a machine, if certain negative token inputs provide +3-10% better accuracy then I am confused why anyone would choose not to do it?

It normalizes that style of thinking and communication in your brain, and forcing you to compartmentmentalize, if you even want to, two standards of treating a problem space's conversation. And since you're human, that will get wuzzier over time until "being rude to get a result" is what you're doing to someone in a shop or on the street.

Don't normalize being an asshole to anyone or anything, machine or not.

  • This is a very odd view to me, but seems prevalent here in this thread. I think treating a machine like a human is extremely degrading to humans. A machine should never be treated like it’s anything approaching a human.

    • "Treating a machine like a human" is a two-party interaction. Of course the layers of matrix multiplication is unaffected by this, but I think that we are not. It's a great opportunity to exercise consistency and dedication to the beauty humanity is capable of and this extends to the entire gradient of conscious/sentient entities.

      It's as silly (to me) to argue that it's degrading to people to treat non-people well. It seems self-obvious that the inverse is true. It benefits the do-er of the deed and makes it that much easier to spread good will when applied to situations where it doesn't matter on the other end. It shows good stewardship as well.

      I'd also make the argument that as inference becomes a feedback loop into training, it only reinforces that we're probably going to benefit from future models ingesting data containing unnecessary politeness.

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  • I disagree, I've been using llms in this way (nearly daily) for 4 years. I'm extremely aggressive and demeaning when I talk to them wherever I think I'll see a better result.

    I'm still extremely kind and polite to everybody in real life, and feel very deeply about people - how I treat them, and care for their emotional state.

    There is absolutely zero crossover between getting a text machine to return a result vs a real human.

    • Then I'll be honest and say that your kindness is likely a façade and I wouldn't trust you if I knew the real you. I'm sorry to say that, and I really don't know who you are at all, but if you're willing to act that way at something that you feel is non-sentient, then all it takes is for someone to convince you that something is non-sentient for you to treat it that way. So, what words does it take for you to consider me non sentient?

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>It's just a machine, if certain negative token inputs provide +3-10% better accuracy then I am confused why anyone would choose not to do it?

then add it to your pre-prompt, no need to practice roleplaying as an asshole.

  • Well I always just start with practical stuff, unless it appears it's going off rails ona specific kind of way repeatedly. Then I try extreme negative prompts to see if it fixes the issue - which it often does.

    I wouldn't say I'm roleplaying an asshole. I'm just using an llm in the best way to get the best accuracy.

    It's not like a personal, secret fetish. It's just a system I use as needed.

    I don't get why you are so uncomfortable with this? It's just tokens in and out of a language model. I feel absolutely nothing when I'm typing "assholish" words to get the output I need.