Comment by doginasuit
12 hours ago
I found the article interesting, humans are flawed enough in a variety of aspects that discovering a convergence here is noteworthy. I don't take it as a sign the LLMs believe anything in particular, they are not capable of belief, as you said.
Everything that comes from an LLM is a human expression, on some level, but if you asked a sampling of humans the same question I wonder if it would come out the same way. How would you explain the difference? What makes that answer more probable?
> Everything that comes from an LLM is a human expression, on some level, but if you asked a sampling of humans the same question I wonder if it would come out the same way. How would you explain the difference? What makes that answer more probable?
RLHF has a way of squashing variance. If the different models are trained on each other or on the same human feedback, then the training would reduce the variety of answers while the similarity of feedback would lead the common answer to be similar.
The different models may prefer the same controversial takes for the same reason that they tend to prefer the same jokes and names. Maybe the authors of the article would have had better luck if they'd used verbalized sampling prompts or something like it.[1]
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01171
> if you asked a sampling of humans the same question I wonder if it would come out the same way. How would you explain the difference?
If you asked a sampling of humans what an AI's most controversial opinion about us is it would be very similar. Or, to be more specific, if you asked a sampling of science fiction writers that question it would be very similar, because that is what the AI training data is based on.
The people who wrote a lot about a topic is who the AI mimics. So the people who wrote a lot about AI is therefore the people who the AI mimics when asked about AI.
>The people who wrote a lot about a topic is who the AI mimics. So the people who wrote a lot about AI is therefore the people who the AI mimics when asked about AI.
AIs/LLMs don't work like this. You don't feed an input, that gets stored and then reproduced, for two reasons:
1. as for humans, inputs are processed and distributed across a very large network of information
2. AIs may have some level of belief (unless on applies the usual circular logic that they can't, because property X is exclusively human).
There's a very interesting research: https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.68/ in which researchers inferred the truthfulness of statements by examining a internal activations. AIs, in short, appeared to have an internal representation of truthfulness.
Not truthfulness; correlation and consistency
If the lie is repeated enough time, and it is consistent in its repetitions it *will* be taken as truth.
AI only aligns with "truth" because in essence "truth" is internally consistent but "lie" needs to be forced to be consistent between multiple parties;
If multiple witnesses seen something and all make a report of it honestly, they might vary but the common points will be consistent with eachother and so that will be scored higher.
A group of liars on the other hand would have to get their stories exactly right for similar thing to happen and so it gets penalized
If you ask people “what is a smart sounding answer to this question” you may well arrive at this result more often than when asking for their actual opinion?
Science fiction and internet comments
Right this is an important thing to note. As an old guy, the fact that the Reddit comment section conceptually took over our culture and then literally is now taking over our culture is really kind of mind-boggling. This is not a good turn of events.
Is it any wonder that LLMs have been behaving the way they do? All the lying, cheating, manipulation, pitting man against machine are well documented in science fiction and think pieces. I haven't seen behaviour beyond those examples so far.
Science fiction and think pieces aren't documentation, they are whimsy. Science fiction in particular is intentionally dramatic for the purposes of entertainment.
AI definitely shouldn't be informing its option of humanity or machines from it, aside from the propensity for science fiction writers to enjoy moralizing and anti capitalism sentiments.
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I agree that LLMs are still just a way to sample from a probabilistic model of things humans say. And in this case the model seems to be pretty darn accurate.
A pretty staggering amount of human discourse consists of ad hominem attacks and accusing each other of being foolishly committed to various real or perceived allegiances. For example the current version of Godwin’s Law around here has conversations gravitating toward people accusing each other of being AI boosters or AI haters.
It's far more likely that the AI got this "controversial idea" from human-written text saying that other humans are groupthinky, not from observing humans being groupthinky.
Or more simply, because that's what "controversial" (from the prompt) means: something few believe that most don't.
It scraped Reddit, if anything it learned that humans are self-loathing and spiteful.
Exactly
> discovering a convergence here is noteworthy
The LLMs are all trained on the same broad corpus, which includes untold quantities of output from every other LLM, not to mention that companies are distilling their rivals left and right. It would be more interesting if they didn't converge.