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What is the obsession with treating ChatGPT like a human? Its not a human its a tool that was created to “reason” about large swaths of data. I don’t understand

What is the obsession with treating ChatGPT like a human? Its not a human its a tool that was created to “reason” about large swaths of data. I don’t understand the backlash people have about some reason needing to be polite to the algorithms. It was be much easier to interact with just extremely direct, non polite language. Not sure why we care about this

tshaddox 3y ago
I interpreted the previous comment as pointing out that it’s trained to respond like a human and usually when you’re chatting with a human you won’t get “good results” if you’re rude.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  I get good results with very terse responses. Too flowery. Make it 2 paragraphs long. Don’t literally say you’re a chef. The tone is wrong, make it more serious. That reference is not real. Pretending it’s a human will not add any useful context to this machine learning model
  - notduncansmith 3y ago
    This has been my experience as well; however, when I want to get an encyclopedic summary of a topic, I’ve noticed that 3.5-turbo is more willing to reply directly to a handful of keywords, whereas GPT-4 typically tries to suss out a more specific question before dedicating itself to replying.
bheadmaster 3y ago
I suppose the question is whether or not being able to reason about large swaths of data requires human-like sentience or something. And if not, what else are human minds doing than reasoning about large swaths of data?
dchest 3y ago
It's not for moral reasons, the reason is simple and practical: ChatGPT is modeling conversations; to get better results, the conversation should look like what it has seen in the training data.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  The prompt is very important but I don’t think having a polite conversation is usually the best approach. I find giving a briefing with bullet points and ideally an example is much better. There is limited context so you shouldn’t waste it on pretending that you’re talking to a human
- ianbutler 3y ago
  This is the right answer, I just casually grepped through a few datasets for instruction tuning I have lying around and please is sprinkled all throughout them.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  Does ChatGPT continually learn from its ongoing conversations? Or is it only trained in advance?
JieJie 3y ago
One doesn't have to treat a tool like a human to treat a tool with respect. A good craftsperson don't leave their tools out in the rain and they take good care of them, that's what good craftspeople do with fine tools. The technology behind chatbots is probably the finest, most well-engineered tool any of us will ever use in our lifetimes, and if we are very, very lucky, we will be able to keep developing them further. Getting upset because our magic talking swords are too polite is a pinnacle of modern-day tech problems.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  I wouldn’t leave my tools to rust but I also wouldn’t tuck them in bed and sing a lullaby to them
- Sharlin 3y ago
  If a tool does not do what you want it to do, it’s not a good tool for the purpose. That includes a LLM being too polite, just like it includes a LLM confabulating a wrong answer to a question. Besides, it is impossible to treat ChatGPT wrong or poorly. It won’t be harmed no matter how you treat it.
  - JieJie 3y ago
    This is a good rebuttal. Right now, Bing Chat is a little bit too Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Genuine People Personality for me[0]. I advocate for open source foundation models so we can all craft personalities tuned to our needs. I think the best tools are adaptable to their user. I went a little overboard on that. We are all reacting to the somewhat-sudden appearance of this new technology in ways that can be a little bit stress-inducing. I made every effort to at least match or lower the temperature from the tone in the original post. From my point of view, I treat the tool well because it's good for me to treat it well. I also think, as is the topic here, that it makes the tool function better. I see it as an intellect-mirror, and it is happy to reflect whatever I show it back at me. [0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/douglas-adams-was-right-get-ready-to-talk-with-digital-personalities/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/douglas-adams-was-ri...
- 3y ago
numpad0 3y ago
LLMs are text generators trained for consistency, often so rigged to pretend to take questions. They know rude and off-point answers are more likely to follow after rude and dumb sounding questions. They are not NOT search engines for hard data or thinking machine that focuses on logic, at least primarily. It just so happens and they just so knows that “1,2,3,4,5” is almost immediately followed by “6,7,8,9,10”.
jameshart 3y ago
It isn’t a human. But it is trying to generate dialog that is consistent with the probability distribution in human-like dialog it has been trained on. To the extent that its training set includes exchanges with people being rude or abusive it has not seen training data where humans typically comply with those instructions.
scotty79 3y ago
> What is the obsession with treating ChatGPT like a human? Well... Next generation of humans or surely the subsequent one will be exposed to a lot of AI generated language. So you probably shouldn't teach AI to speak in a manner you wouldn't appreciate in your grandchildren.
akiselev 3y ago
Have you never heard of the Cylons?

tshaddox 3y ago

I interpreted the previous comment as pointing out that it’s trained to respond like a human and usually when you’re chatting with a human you won’t get “good results” if you’re rude.

coffeebeqn 3y ago
I get good results with very terse responses. Too flowery. Make it 2 paragraphs long. Don’t literally say you’re a chef. The tone is wrong, make it more serious. That reference is not real. Pretending it’s a human will not add any useful context to this machine learning model
- notduncansmith 3y ago
  This has been my experience as well; however, when I want to get an encyclopedic summary of a topic, I’ve noticed that 3.5-turbo is more willing to reply directly to a handful of keywords, whereas GPT-4 typically tries to suss out a more specific question before dedicating itself to replying.

bheadmaster 3y ago

I suppose the question is whether or not being able to reason about large swaths of data requires human-like sentience or something. And if not, what else are human minds doing than reasoning about large swaths of data?

dchest 3y ago

It's not for moral reasons, the reason is simple and practical: ChatGPT is modeling conversations; to get better results, the conversation should look like what it has seen in the training data.

coffeebeqn 3y ago
The prompt is very important but I don’t think having a polite conversation is usually the best approach. I find giving a briefing with bullet points and ideally an example is much better. There is limited context so you shouldn’t waste it on pretending that you’re talking to a human
ianbutler 3y ago
This is the right answer, I just casually grepped through a few datasets for instruction tuning I have lying around and please is sprinkled all throughout them.
SoftTalker 3y ago
Does ChatGPT continually learn from its ongoing conversations? Or is it only trained in advance?

JieJie 3y ago

One doesn't have to treat a tool like a human to treat a tool with respect. A good craftsperson don't leave their tools out in the rain and they take good care of them, that's what good craftspeople do with fine tools. The technology behind chatbots is probably the finest, most well-engineered tool any of us will ever use in our lifetimes, and if we are very, very lucky, we will be able to keep developing them further. Getting upset because our magic talking swords are too polite is a pinnacle of modern-day tech problems.

coffeebeqn 3y ago
I wouldn’t leave my tools to rust but I also wouldn’t tuck them in bed and sing a lullaby to them
Sharlin 3y ago
If a tool does not do what you want it to do, it’s not a good tool for the purpose. That includes a LLM being too polite, just like it includes a LLM confabulating a wrong answer to a question. Besides, it is impossible to treat ChatGPT wrong or poorly. It won’t be harmed no matter how you treat it.
- JieJie 3y ago
  This is a good rebuttal. Right now, Bing Chat is a little bit too Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Genuine People Personality for me[0]. I advocate for open source foundation models so we can all craft personalities tuned to our needs. I think the best tools are adaptable to their user. I went a little overboard on that. We are all reacting to the somewhat-sudden appearance of this new technology in ways that can be a little bit stress-inducing. I made every effort to at least match or lower the temperature from the tone in the original post. From my point of view, I treat the tool well because it's good for me to treat it well. I also think, as is the topic here, that it makes the tool function better. I see it as an intellect-mirror, and it is happy to reflect whatever I show it back at me. [0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/douglas-adams-was-right-get-ready-to-talk-with-digital-personalities/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/douglas-adams-was-ri...
3y ago

numpad0 3y ago

LLMs are text generators trained for consistency, often so rigged to pretend to take questions. They know rude and off-point answers are more likely to follow after rude and dumb sounding questions. They are not NOT search engines for hard data or thinking machine that focuses on logic, at least primarily. It just so happens and they just so knows that “1,2,3,4,5” is almost immediately followed by “6,7,8,9,10”.

jameshart 3y ago

It isn’t a human. But it is trying to generate dialog that is consistent with the probability distribution in human-like dialog it has been trained on. To the extent that its training set includes exchanges with people being rude or abusive it has not seen training data where humans typically comply with those instructions.

scotty79 3y ago

> What is the obsession with treating ChatGPT like a human? Well... Next generation of humans or surely the subsequent one will be exposed to a lot of AI generated language. So you probably shouldn't teach AI to speak in a manner you wouldn't appreciate in your grandchildren.

akiselev 3y ago

Have you never heard of the Cylons?