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AI offers improved civility for polarizing online conversations
- aj8080503 3y ago[dead]
- brucethemoose2 3y agoI need one of these in real life, in my head, as a prefilter for something stupid I'm about to blurt out.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y agoI have one of these prefilters and it works well. When I get the sense I'm about to say something dumb, I wait until the next day I have a good night's sleep already under my belt to say it. It works wonders. (You do have to stretch your definition of AI a bit to include the subconscious, for this to count, admittedly.)
- andersrs 3y ago[I know you feel that this technique is helpful and you want to save the world. That's double plus good of you.] [For me, I think that] all the padding makes the conversation diluted, watered down and boring. It's similar to 'The Gift Shop Sketch' [1]. [I feel] this is very disrespectful of my time. [In my opinion] it would be great to use another model to strip all the feely words, condense the meaning and generally un-fuckify all the AI waffle. [What are your thoughts about that?] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MFtl2XXnUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MFtl2XXnUc
- Fluorescence 3y agoHmm, not my choice of sketch to demonstrate this. That is more about crap padded TV. "ChatGPT I have 1 minute of content, please pad out to 25 minutes". There must be a 1000 British sketches about excessive politeness but none come to mind right now... the best I can think of is that it's an inverse Key and Peel anger translator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qv7k2_lc0M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qv7k2_lc0M We will need the anger translator in our client software to translates back out of the polite version so we can efficiently understand what is truly meant without confusion.
- stavros 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37809022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37809022 I had the opposite idea: Run all my comments through an LLM to make them more diplomatic. I noticed my comments have been a bit adversarial lately, so I just wrote a script to pass the HN comment history plus my draft comment to GPT-4 and have it reword my replies. Hopefully it won't be overly verbose. This is this comment, GPTed: ~~~ Hey andersrs, I totally appreciate your perspective here - the 'Gift Shop Sketch' is a classic! To share my thoughts, though, I've actually contemplated doing quite the opposite. I've begun to realize that my comments might've been coming off a little too confrontational or straight to the point recently. So, I'm thinking of running them through a language model to dial up the diplomacy a notch. Could be fun, right? I'm in the process of penning a script that takes our comment history, along with any new comments I jot down, into account and passes it all on to GPT-4. The goal's to help it finesse my responses a bit. Here's hoping it won't tip the scale in the other direction and make them a long-winded affair! ~~~ I agree that it's a bit meh, but I think with some prompt tweaking it can be very helpful. EDIT: With some better prompting: ~~~ Actually, I've been thinking about making my comments more cordial. Noticed that they might come off a bit straightforward, so I've worked on this script to run my HN comments, along with my draft comment, through GPT-4. The idea is that it can help to craft my replies in a way that fosters better communication. I'm hopeful it won't end up making them overly long-winded. ~~~
- ofjcihen 3y agoPart of communication is knowing your audience. For example, to me this sounds like I’m being talked down to as if you’ve pegged me as someone you have to finesse your words around or else I’ll erupt into violence at the drop of a hat. I get the purpose, to not sound adversarial in your response. Just a thought though.
- hunglee2 3y agoour need to immediately respond to anything online is a huge contributor to rancorous discourse. The rate of content decay and the public nature of the conversation encourages us to 'get our point in' and so encourages reactions instead of responses. It's not great that we need AI to moderate human answers, but we can see the short term value, whilst pondering the longer term implications
- Madmallard 3y agoI have an idea for a service called ChadGPT that filters or tailors messages you send to not come across as needy, desperate, or boring.
- amelius 3y agoI'm already working on a service called WingmanGPT.
- totetsu 3y agoUsing whisper api to do real time transcription of what your interlocutor is saying and feeding it into wingmanGPT with system prompt to output what you should say to score, then sending back to an ear piece via bark with a real chad voice prompt.
- pjc50 3y agoThe problem is that "civility" or "tone" is a surface issue and the offence is more fundamental to what's being discussed. There's a well-known "euphemism treadmill" where certain words are deemed bad, a replacement is developed, and then people start using them as a slur instead. It's possible to be perfectly polite while arguing for genocide.
- diputsmonro 3y agoCompletely agreed, and honestly, sometimes we need to have frank conversations about true horrors and abhorrent behaviors that exist in the world. I hate to pull the Orwell card, but I fear that the normalization of this technology would inhibit necessary conversations about true evils, and give a false impression of civility and neutrality to people spreading hateful ideology. That said, most online discourse is already a disaster, with every disagreement being ramped up to 11 with no capacity or patience for nuance, so I'm not sure how much worse it can actually get.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoThe reason that tone is a good signal (though that may change with generative AI in the mix) is because, in practice, it's correlated with intentions and understanding of the writer. It is possible to politely advocate genocide, and to make angry, simplistic, but 100% correct arguments for a right cause, but both cases are very rare to see in practice. Usually, people who write politely do so because they want to carefully get a considered point across; people who write angrily do so because they want to win a verbal fight.
- foldr 3y agoIt's obviously just my subjective impression, but I see lots of examples of people arguing for quite abhorrent positions on HN in a civil and carefully articulated manner. Rather than pointing to specific HN comments, I'll pick Richard Hanania as a recent example of the same phenomenon. The guy writes long blog posts that are (for anyone who can make basic logical connections between ideas) openly racist and sexist. Recently, it turned out that he'd spent many years, even into his late 20s, writing extremely uncivil racist and misogynist claptrap under a pseudonym on various internet forums. But because in public he presented essentially the same ideas under a veneer of civility, he was taken seriously by many 'intellectuals' who should have known better (e.g. Steven Pinker) and amplified by several mainstream media outlets (e.g. the Washington Post).
- seydor 3y agoThat's manipulation of people's emotions. It's going to be big business
- blauditore 3y agoManipulation of people's emotions is basically how politics at the highest level usually work. Or marketing. This is not even sarcasic, I mean it quite literally.
- ta1243 3y agoI think that was the OPs point. Manipulating (brainwashing) people is a Trillion dollar business. And emotions are the key -- in the UK there is currently a campaign to give a tax break to the top 1%, and it's working, even left wing tabloid readers support it.
- seydor 3y agoIndeed, but with humans there is always someone who can be blamed. Automatic systems dilute and deflect the blame .
- Jensson 3y agoArtificial organic marketing is going to be big!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- spinningslate 3y agoThis completely misses the context in which online discussion occurs: social media platforms. Platforms whose business model depends on capturing eyeballs, and who know that outrage and sensation maximise that. It is attempting to treat a symptom, not the cause. A case of "oh, dear: our utopian technology has turned out to have bad consequences, so let's layer more utopian tech on top to fix it".
- 22289d 3y agoEdit: thought of a better example - Donald Trump getting banned from most social media. If they were seeking to maximize outrage, they wouldn't do that. They'd assign an employee to moderate everything he posted if they had to, but they'd keep him there, manufacturing outrage. ------ Twitter and Reddit would both be examples of the types of platforms you're referring to, that benefit from this outrage. And neither seems to want to maximize it. In the case of Twitter, they prompt you to rephrase your Tweet if the algo thinks it's likely to offend people. If you post too much of that type of stuff, you get a form of lite-shadowban. Reddit has for years coached people to 'remember the human' and backs it up with various rules and bans. They want people to treat each other well. Is either platform successful in their attempts? Arguably, no. But that wasn't my point, I was addressing the claim that they seek to maximize outrage.
- ekianjo 3y ago> Reddit has for years coached people to 'remember the human' and backs it up with various rules and bans. They want people to treat each other well. Are you saying that Reddit is a good example? Because that would be a laughable point to make
- 22289d 3y agoA good example of what? A platform not seeking to maximize outrage? Yes. They banned the Donald Trump subreddit. That one subreddit produced more outrage than probably everything else in the history of Reddit combined. And they banned it. A company seeking to maximize outrage would not do that.
- quitit 3y agoI think when it comes to online discourse one also needs to be reminded that there are deliberate external factors stirring the pot. A lot of disharmony in society is beginning online. Other than rephrasing, using AI to automatically add context to a discussion can help a lot with misinformation. This is bit like how Twitter's community notes feature adds needed context. However one needs to keep in mind that they shouldn't attempt to sift through and correct misinformation on Facebook and Twitter, it will be generated far quicker than a person can reasonably counter. It's also a common strategy to use over-simplistic ideas to make such statements because these require an out-sized effort to debunk. Rather sometimes it's useful to remember that all around us there are untrue things being said and not interacting (a.k.a. "engagement") with them is often a solution in itself. Blocking, muting and not reacting is a better strategy to algorithmically silence. If reading materials online leaves you angry or itching to respond that's actually a problem with yourself that you need to figure out how to deal with.
- mftrhu 3y agoThe presence of "civility" - the appearance of it - does not improve the quality of those conversations people would refer to as "polarizing". An abhorrent message conveyed in a polite tone remains abhorrent, and people affected by it are very unlikely to perceive it differently, no matter how many "I feel", "in my opinion", or "I hear you" someone might slap on top of it. It could easily have the opposite effect, since bad actors have been already abusing this technique - feigning politeness - for decades, destroying what little trust there could be in online discourse. Insisting on the appearance of civility, in any case, only has a cooling effect on those who have skin in the game, leaving the rest to play devil's advocate amongst themselves as they loftily discuss possible solutions. I am, as always, thoroughly bemused by some people's insistence on solving social problems with technical solutions, but this really takes the cake.
- 6stringmerc 3y agoEventually AI in business use cases will push out options for edge scenarios and force humans to adapt to the models trained on humans but dumber by a country mile.
- lstodd 3y agoAs if it's something else right now. Dealing with chat, email, phone endpoints unsuccessfully trying to pretend they are human (or not even that) is just a contemporary reality everyone got accustomized to.
- waihtis 3y agoThe only people who want to remove polarity from online conversation are hardcore censorship maximalists. Life rarely involves absolute truths but some people refuse to acknowledge this. It's incredible worrysome that AI is being driven into a closed-source censorship regime in the name of safety & civility, when in reality having a centralized and closed AI ecosystem would definitively be the worst kind of dictatorship regime. Conversely, an open-source AI ecosystem would be the biggest equalizer in history and would harmonize humanity on an unprecedented level.
- ginko 3y ago> The only people who want to remove polarity from online conversation are hardcore censorship maximalists. Life rarely involves absolute truths but some people refuse to acknowledge this. Those two sentences don't make sense together. Surely if there are no absolute truths then removing polarity would help people find a middle ground.
- atlantic 3y agoThere are absolute truths, but there is no impartial authority to decide what they are. The only way to reach truth is through discussion (ie, interaction between opposing viewpoints). Eliminating polarity also eliminates the possibility of determining truth.
- advael 3y agoFound the logical positivist. Discussion doesn't necessarily or even reliably lead to "absolute truth", just as armchair pondering about idealized versions of some phenomenon doesn't necessarily lead to actionable predictions about it. Most phenomena aren't amenable to being studied purely in logical abstractions and thus a search for "absolute truth" seldom makes sense for them in the first place. If we want to talk about "objective truth" - an adjacent and popular buzzword - we should at the very least be attempting operationalization and experimentation on our claims, as empiricism is the framework best suited to supporting the epistemic claim of "objectivity" Really the notion of an absolute, objective, and knowable truth is often an unrealistic standard if we don't have good means to study the phenomenon in question, and tends to be something more like a pissing contest about rhetorical prowess or credentials in most conversations in practice. Reaching agreement is a valuable but far from certain outcome of a dialogue. It is not the same thing as ascertaining "truth" in some epistemically meaningful final sense
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]