4 ms·

It still doesn't seem very interesting, even assuming the theory is right. Like, what's the interesting conversation you envision would happen here?

by pvg 1y ago

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
pavel_lishin 1y ago
It's not an interesting conversation. It's a live example of what's happening with grok right now, and it's not hard to parse: 1. Person A posts something 2. Person B calls @grok to weigh in 3. @grok starts babbling about South Africans
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  It probably is representative of training data based on Musk’s bent world view but doesn’t come across as effective propaganda. If it said some particular farmer got attacked at a particular time and it happens at a certain rate or so and so threatened more attacks or something it might be persuasive. As it is it just looks like an unhinged part of the cringiverse.
  - tracker1 1y ago
    It could also be based on what Grok is being fed from the users... IIRC, there was an early AI bot from Microsoft intended to have the mentality of a young teen, and within a couple days, the bot was a racist slut just from interactions. It depends on how the bot takes in the information it is interacting with, not necessarily the directions of a single person... I mean, someone asks, "What's going on with the farmer's in South Africa?" and the bot has seen all the unhinged posts about the topic, and injects that information into the position. It's not necessarily malice, but yet another example of why I generally don't trust AI platforms and would reject actions based on AI results without external validation.
- pvg 1y ago
  I'm not having trouble parsing it, I'm asking what would make this an interesting HN post.
  - sanderjd 1y ago
    It looks like the system prompt may have been modified, or that it may be some kind of attack on the system prompt, or possibly someone attacking the training data, or it may be totally organic somehow, in which case it's still interesting how topics can leak into responses to unrelated questions. These are all interesting topics for the crowd on HN to weigh in on. If I searched for some arbitrary thing on Google right now and the AI generated results gave me a bunch of unrelated slop about South Africa, we would certainly be discussing how that might have happened. This is no different.
    - pvg 1y ago
      'Musk fiddles with twitter to match his weird views' is a very repetitive story that's been on HN a bunch, including recently so I guess I don't see the interestingness in this case. The 'attack' thing is your gloss, I don't see it appearing in any of the reporting.
      - sanderjd 1y ago
        A story that I think is clearly worth discussing on HN is "what seems to have happened with grok here?". Musk fiddling with the system prompt is only one of the possibilities. People here can make arguments for or against that theory or others. But also, it's news worth discussing on a technology news discussion site if the owner of one of the largest technology platforms by reach is manipulating the information on that platform in a new way, even if there have been lots of other discussions about them manipulating things in other ways. Notably, I think the only uninteresting threads here are the ones like this one that are questioning why this is news. Yawn.
      - craftsman 1y ago
        I'm guessing that your view aligns with the theory that novelty is one of the more important measures of a HN post. In other words, a topic that "is a very repetitive story that's been on HN a bunch" is not novel, so is less valuable on HN. In any case, whether that is your view or not (sorry if I misinterpreted you), I think this is too narrow a view. A topic can be one that has been on HN a lot, but still be novel, interesting, fresh if the new story has some different twist or nuance to it. Also, not everyone reads HN to the same degree, so what is "very repetitive" to one set of readers may not be to another. I know that some users flag certain posts (and mods do not subsequently unflag them, even on appeal) because of their perception of a post's lack of novelty, but this seems overly censorial when these users could skip reading it, not upvote it, etc.

It still doesn't seem very interesting, even assuming the theory is right. Like, what's the interesting conversation you envision would happen here?

by pvg 1y ago

It still doesn't seem very interesting, even assuming the theory is right. Like, what's the interesting conversation you envision would happen here?

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

pavel_lishin 1y ago

It's not an interesting conversation. It's a live example of what's happening with grok right now, and it's not hard to parse: 1. Person A posts something 2. Person B calls @grok to weigh in 3. @grok starts babbling about South Africans

PaulHoule 1y ago
It probably is representative of training data based on Musk’s bent world view but doesn’t come across as effective propaganda. If it said some particular farmer got attacked at a particular time and it happens at a certain rate or so and so threatened more attacks or something it might be persuasive. As it is it just looks like an unhinged part of the cringiverse.
- tracker1 1y ago
  It could also be based on what Grok is being fed from the users... IIRC, there was an early AI bot from Microsoft intended to have the mentality of a young teen, and within a couple days, the bot was a racist slut just from interactions. It depends on how the bot takes in the information it is interacting with, not necessarily the directions of a single person... I mean, someone asks, "What's going on with the farmer's in South Africa?" and the bot has seen all the unhinged posts about the topic, and injects that information into the position. It's not necessarily malice, but yet another example of why I generally don't trust AI platforms and would reject actions based on AI results without external validation.
pvg 1y ago
I'm not having trouble parsing it, I'm asking what would make this an interesting HN post.
- sanderjd 1y ago
  It looks like the system prompt may have been modified, or that it may be some kind of attack on the system prompt, or possibly someone attacking the training data, or it may be totally organic somehow, in which case it's still interesting how topics can leak into responses to unrelated questions. These are all interesting topics for the crowd on HN to weigh in on. If I searched for some arbitrary thing on Google right now and the AI generated results gave me a bunch of unrelated slop about South Africa, we would certainly be discussing how that might have happened. This is no different.
  - pvg 1y ago
    'Musk fiddles with twitter to match his weird views' is a very repetitive story that's been on HN a bunch, including recently so I guess I don't see the interestingness in this case. The 'attack' thing is your gloss, I don't see it appearing in any of the reporting.
    - sanderjd 1y ago
      A story that I think is clearly worth discussing on HN is "what seems to have happened with grok here?". Musk fiddling with the system prompt is only one of the possibilities. People here can make arguments for or against that theory or others. But also, it's news worth discussing on a technology news discussion site if the owner of one of the largest technology platforms by reach is manipulating the information on that platform in a new way, even if there have been lots of other discussions about them manipulating things in other ways. Notably, I think the only uninteresting threads here are the ones like this one that are questioning why this is news. Yawn.
    - craftsman 1y ago
      I'm guessing that your view aligns with the theory that novelty is one of the more important measures of a HN post. In other words, a topic that "is a very repetitive story that's been on HN a bunch" is not novel, so is less valuable on HN. In any case, whether that is your view or not (sorry if I misinterpreted you), I think this is too narrow a view. A topic can be one that has been on HN a lot, but still be novel, interesting, fresh if the new story has some different twist or nuance to it. Also, not everyone reads HN to the same degree, so what is "very repetitive" to one set of readers may not be to another. I know that some users flag certain posts (and mods do not subsequently unflag them, even on appeal) because of their perception of a post's lack of novelty, but this seems overly censorial when these users could skip reading it, not upvote it, etc.