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Oh fuck! How do people feel about robots that leverage profanity?
- rolph 1y agothe actual title seems to be unacceptable, however the obvious profanity version is. [pseudo]actual title : "Oh F**k! How Do People Feel about Robots that Leverage Profanity?" even this breaks, very interesting
- pvg 1y agoHN fucks https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39392726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39392726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44122636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44122636
- kingforaday 1y agoSo does Jared Dunn from Silicon Valley.
- zfnmxt 1y agoGood; censoring profanity (especially self-censoring) is for cowards. Be brave and dish out your fucks liberally in your papers!
- sim7c00 1y agointeresting paper / idea. i like the idea of a robot or ai who uses profanity like a regular person (if thats ur thing, guess it depends on ur context). i know people who instruct their ai assistants to be rude, mean or profane because they listen better to that. like asking it to tell you to RTFM if you ask a question thats trivially answered (compared to some further context you specify , or not). i suppose everyone learns to listen better to certain personas through their lifes experiences, so its good to be able to tune it towards personal preferences and not but overly protective or conservative limits or restrictions. (obviously thats a snake pit so i do totally understand tight restrictions)
- mrandish 1y agoThe default obsequious, yuppie buddy chatbot personas of today make me hate them. Douglas Adams in Hitchhiker's Guide perfectly captured the infuriating annoyance of machines programmed to act like overly polite friends when he had the automatic doors always tell you how delighted they were to open for you. It's a machine, dammit. One of its (potential) advantages vs hiring a human is not having extraneous transactional exchanges. If my personal AI assistant had to have a persona, I'd rather it sound and talk like Joe Pesci from Goodfellas.
- jcims 1y agoI'm tinkering with the 'indifferent god' persona and it's been very refreshing.
- stavros 1y agoIf you think of LLMs as machines, you will be surprised a lot more than if you think of them as humans, so the latter is the better abstraction.
- mrandish 1y ago> you will be surprised a lot more than if you think of them as humans, so the latter is the better abstraction. I'm not following what you mean here. In what ways do you think I'd be surprised?
- stavros 1y agoIn that they can't do math, they don't follow instructions well, they aren't accurate, which are all things that are surprising for machines but very non-surprising for humans.
- mrandish 1y agoOh, I see. I'm already well aware of the many substantial limitations of LLMs and the counter-intuitive nature of these gaps. My comment was pre-assuming a scenario where the chat AI could usefully and correctly answer the question and, even in that case, I want the chat AI to just answer the question and not pretend to have a human-like personality.
- jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago[flagged]
- frereubu 1y agoI'm so old I object to "leverage" as a verb.
- jjmarr 1y agoSwearing increases the effectiveness of other words.
- pixl97 1y agoNormal robot: "Going into that room could be hazardous or lead to death" Bender: "If you go in that room you're going to fucking die"
- AStonesThrow 1y agoOr decreases the effectiveness, as the listener perceives pain or offense or low intelligence, and tunes out the rest of the utterance.
- PlunderBunny 1y agoAbsolutely - repeated profanity is an invitation to ignore the speaker.
- const_cast 1y agoSometimes, but I think most people are pretty simple and straightforward. There's a lot of smokers who hear the yearly "smoking increases your risk of heart disease and yadda yadda yadda..." and they still smoke. Then my grandfather got told "if you don't quit smoking you're going to fucking die, and not a doctor on Earth can save you". And then he quit. 3 heart attacks in, by the way. Intellectualizing everything isn't necessarily good for communication. Conversational tone can be powerful.
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- avsteele 1y agoProfanity should not be in the title of scientific articles. Most unprofessional. In addition, titling your article for shock value should be discouraged. The end point will be a degraded discourse.
- zfnmxt 1y agoProfessionalism is not a virtue; measured irreverence is---an uncensored "Fuck" in this scenario falls into that category. Silliness has an important and necessary place in research.
- avsteele 1y agoNOT in professional communication. If you want to run your lab that way, feel free.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ghssds 1y agoWe tell children to don't use profanity because they have a hard time regulating themselves. Telling adults to do the same is misplaced authoritarian behavior, the kind that may come from people who failed to mature and still obey (and repeat) what they were told as a child but now sound obsequious.
- scottyah 1y agoProfanity largely exists to be offensive, and loses power when ubiquitous. It especially loses power when five year olds say it for every little mood swing they have. Nobody wants to hear offensive words from a child because it makes adults realize how childish they sound.
- arp242 1y agoI've joined jobs and the first thing people said to me is "ah, you must be the new cunt!" Different people have different standards for this type of thing. Be a good cunt and accept that there are over 8 billion people on the world, some of whom have very different norms than you have. Don't declare your own standards as somehow authoritative.
- mousethatroared 1y agoTails are what get you though. I'd probably smash a robot that swore at me or my family. "Tell your c---t daughter to get off the street" Will probably result in me looking for a heavy stone. Swear words are literally fighting words whilst a robot cannot, legally, be assaulted. I'll take destruction of property to defend my daughter's honor to a jury of normies.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Swizec 1y agoI'd prefer swearing over a robot who says "Per my last email, ..." But let's be honest: The thing we're both afraid of is a robot who can get impatient and emotional.
- mousethatroared 1y agoThey've already programmed impatience to the chat bots in federal government offices. Get testy and they'll hang up on you. However, they can't get emotional, they lack soul.
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- teddyh 1y ago“But Orcs and Trolls spoke as they would, without love of words or things; and their language was actually more degraded and filthy than I have shown it. I do not suppose that any will wish for a closer rendering, though models are easy to find. Much the same sort of talk can still be heard among the orc-minded; dreary and repetitive with hatred and contempt, too long removed from good to retain even verbal vigour, save in the ears of those to whom only the squalid sounds strong.” — J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, Appendix F, Part II, On Translation
- trebligdivad 1y agoSwearing is very location dependent, as a Brit, and a northern one at that, peppering a few swear words in may not be that unusual. This can, erm how shall we put it, 'surprise' some others.
- Molitor5901 1y agoMy first question would be: Why? As in: Why do we even need or want to program robots to use profanity?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- beefnugs 1y agoBecause the cutest little fluf ball who just squeeked she loves me then wobbles back and forth back to her charging station blurting out an oh fuck as she stubs her toe is hilarious and i deserve to have that in my life
- vasusen 1y agoGrok's unhinged mode is the closest I have seen a bot that leverages profanity. I find it quite entertaining to use occasionally like watching a South Park episode.
- CaffeineLD50 1y agoI fucking approve!
- Yizahi 1y agoRobots today can't "leverage profanity". Robots today can generate words either excluding profanity via some pre-made dictionary or not excluding them. Since both results are simply rehash of the human created data, of course it is possible to program robots to copy profanity too. It really says nothing about the robot, because it is a robot; but a characteristic of a human who programmed it.