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> Rather than enhancing our human qualities, these systems degrade our social relations, and undermine our capacity for empathy and care. I don't genuinely exp

• tines 1y ago
  > I can think of few things as intellectually miserable as the #help channels of the many open source projects on Discord, for example. Should I wager a guess, if these projects all integrated LLMs into their chatbots for just a few bucks and let them take on the brunt of the interactions, all participants on either side would be left with much more capacity to maintain and express empathy and care, or to nurture social connections. This extends beyond these noncommercial contexts of course, to stuff like customer service for example. This would be a good counter if this were all that this technology is being used for.
  • perching_aix 1y ago
    I don't think it's necessary for me to counter everything they're saying. They're making a unilateral judgement - as long as I can demonstrate a good counter for one part of it, the unilateral judgement will fail to hold. They can of course still argue that it's majority-bad for whatever list of reasons, but that's not what bugs me. What bugs me is the absolute tunnel vision of "for principled reasons I must find this thing completely and utterly bad, no matter what". Because this is what the title, and the tone, and just about everything else in this article comes across as to me, and I find it equal parts terrifying and disagreeable.
    • asciimov 1y ago
      > What bugs me is the absolute tunnel vision of "for principled reasons I must find this thing completely and utterly bad, no matter what". AI companies also only sell the public on the upside of these technologies. Behind closed doors they are investing hard on this with the hope to reduce or eliminate their labor cost with no regard to any damage to society.
      • perching_aix 1y ago
        I don't think fighting misrepresentation with misrepresentation is a winning strategy.
  • Lerc 1y ago
    >This would be a good counter if this were all that this technology is being used for. Do you hold the position that a thing is bad because it is possible to do harm, or that it is predominantly causing harm? Most criticisms cite examples demonstrating the existence of harm because proving existence requires a single example. Calculating the sum of an effect is much harder. Even if the current impact of a field is predominantly harmful, it does not stand that the problem is with the what is being attempted. Consider healthcare, a few hundred years ago much of healthcare did more harm than good, charlatans and frauds were commonplace. Was that because healthcare itself was a bad thing? Was it a mistake to even go down that path?
    • adamc 1y ago
      I don't think the path was fixed by healthcare, per se. It was fixed by adopting scientific investigation. So I think your argument is kind of misleading.
      • Lerc 1y ago
        Why misleading? I am advocating adopting methods of improvement rather than abandoning the persuit of beneficial results. I think science was just a part of the solution to healthcare, much of the advance was also in what was considered allowable or ethical. There remains a great deal of harmful medical practices that are used today in places where regulation is weak. Science has done little to stop those harms. The advances that led to the requirement for a scientific backing were social. That those practices persist in some places is not a scientific issue but a social one.
        • adamc 1y ago
          Because adopting having "doctors", for example, isn't really what made for better healthcare. We had doctors for centuries (arguably millenia) who were useful in very limited cases, and probably harmful most of the rest of the time. What made for better healthcare was changing the way we investigated problems. That ultimately enabled "doctors" to be quite useful. But the fact that the "profession" existed earlier is not what allowed it to bloom.
• m4rtink 1y ago
  I am not sure about your experience, but these types of channles seem to mostly have the issues of people being to bussy to repply, but when they do, there is often an interesting interaction & this is how users often become contributors to the project over time. Sure, if you want to make sure you don't get any more contributors, you can try to replace that with a chatbot that will always reply immediately, but might just be wrong like 40% of the time, is not actually working on the project and will certainly not help in building sociel interactions between the project and its users.
  • perching_aix 1y ago
    I have participated in such channels for multiple years on the assisting side, and have been keeping in touch with some of the folks I knew from there still doing it. Also note that the projects I helped around with were more end-user focused. Most interactions start with users being vague. This can already result in some helpers getting triggered, and starting to be vaguely snarky, but usually this is resolved by using prepared bot commands... which these users sometimes just won't read. Then the misunderstandings start. Or the misplaced expectations. Or the lies. Or maybe the given helper has been having a bad day, but due to their long time presence in the project, they won't be moderated out properly. And so on. It's just not a good experience. Ever since I left, I got screencaps of various kinds of conversations. In some cases, the user was being objectively insufferable - I don't think it's fair to expect a human to put up with that. Other times, the helper was being unnecessarily mean - they did not appreciate my feedback on that. Neither happens with LLMs. People don't grow resentful of the never ending horde of what feels like increasingly clueless users, and innocent folk don't get randomly chewed out for not living up to the optimality expectations of those who tend to 1000s of cases similar to theirs every week.
    • whatevertrevor 1y ago
      I think the solution is neither AI nor human in this case. While direct human support is invaluable in many cases, I find it really hard to believe how our industry has completely forgotten the value of public support forums. Here are some pure advantages over Discord/Slack/<Insert private chat platform of your liking> - Much much better search functionality out of the box, because you can leverage existing search engines. - From the above it follows that high value contributors do not need to spend their valuable time repeatedly answering the same basic questions over and over. - Your high value contributors don't have to be employees of the company, as many enthusiastic power users often participate and contribute in such places. - Conversations are _much_ easier to follow without having to resort to hidden threads and forums posts on Discord that no one will ever read or search. - Over time you build a living library of supporting documentation instead of useful information being strewn in many tiny conversations over months. - No user expectation to be helped immediately. A forum sets the expectation that this is an async method of communication, so you're less likely to see entitled aggravating behavior (though you won't see many users giving you good questions with relevant information attached even on forums).
• eikenberry 1y ago
  > [..] if these projects all integrated LLMs into their chatbots for just a few bucks [..] No matter your position on the AI helpfulness, asking volunteers to not only spend time helping support a free software project but to also pony up money is just doubling down on the burden free software maintainers face as was highlighted in the recent libxml2 discussion.
  • perching_aix 1y ago
    A lot of the projects that maintain Discord servers in my experience will receive plenty enough donations to make up for the $5 it'd take to serve the traffic that hits their Discord for help with AI. Yes I did run the numbers. It's so (intentionally) cheap, this is a non-issue. But then one could also just argue that this is something the individual projects can decide for themselves. Not really for either of us to make this call. You can consider what I said as just an example you disagree with in that case.
• butundstand 1y ago
  In their bio: “I’m not a tech worker…” they like to tinker with code and local Linux servers. They have not seen how robotic the job has become and felt how much pressure there is to act like a copy-paste/git pull assembly line.
• reval 1y ago
  The counter-counter-argument is that the messy part of human interaction is necessary for social cohesion. I’ve already witnessed this erosion prior to LLMs in the rise of SMS over phone calls (personal) and automated menu systems for customer service (institutional). It is sad to me that the skill required to navigate everyday life are being delegated to technology. Pretty soon it won’t matter what you think or feel about your neighbors because you will only ever know their tech-mediated facade.
  • perching_aix 1y ago
    I'm not sure I'd agree with characterizing heavily asymmetric social interactions, such as customer service folks assisting tens or hundreds of people on the same issues every week and similar, a "necessarily messy part of human interaction for social cohesion".
    • svieira 1y ago
      It is well noted that it is very hard to get in contact with a human at Google when you have a problem. And then we wonder why Google never seems to understand its user base.
      • perching_aix 1y ago
        I don't think these two are actually related, and the automated contact options Google and other megacorporations provide were significantly behind on these developments the last time I tried interacting with them. Namely, e.g. Meta has basically no support line. There was even a thread here a few days ago chronicling that.
      • fc417fc802 1y ago
        Talking to a human doesn't imply that management necessarily cares about you or your usercase. Automated help used to be categorically bad due to lack of technology. Now it has the potential to be good. The ability of the tech and the alignment of the process are entirely orthogonal.
  • 1y ago
• reaperducer 1y ago
  if these projects all integrated LLMs into their chatbots for just a few bucks and let them take on the brunt of the interactions, all participants on either side would be left with much more capacity to maintain and express empathy and care Maybe. But only if the LLMs are correct. Which they too frequently aren't. So the result is that the tech industry has figured out how to not only automate making people angry and frustrated, they've managed to do it at scale. Yay.
• trod1234 1y ago
  This assumes the conclusion that AI would solve the lack of resources interaction issue. Unfortunately the data has been in on this for quite a long time (longer the LLM chatbots have been in existence) if you've worked in IT at a large carrier provider or for large call centers you know about this. The simple fact of the matter is, there is a sharp gap between what an AI can do, and what a human does in any role involving communications, especially customer service. Worse, there are psychological responses that naturally occur when you do any number of a few specific things that escalate conflict if you leave this to an AI. A qualified CSR person is taught how to de-escalate, diffuse, and calm the person who has been wound up to the point of irrationality. They are the front-line punching bags. AI can't differentiate between what's acceptable, and what's not because the tokens it uses to identify these contexts have two contradictory states in the same underlying tokens. This goes to core classical computer science problems of halting, and other aspects. The companies that were ahead of the curb for this invested a lot into this almost a decade and a half ago, and they found that in most cases these types of systems exponentiated the issues once they did finally get to a person, and they took it out on that person irrationally because they were the representative of the company that put them through what amounts to torture. Some examples of behavior that causes these types of responses are when you are being manipulated in a way that you know is manipulation, it causes stress through perceptual blindspots causing an inconsistent internal mental state resulting in confusion. When that happens it causes a psychological reversal often of irrational anger. An infinite or byzantine loop designed to run people in circular hamster wheels is one such structure. If you've ever been in a social interaction where you offer an olive branch and they seem to accept it, but at the last minute through it back in your face, you've experienced this. The smart individual doesn't ever do this because they know they will make an enemy for life who will always remember. This is also how through communication, you can impose coercive cost on people, and companies have done this for years where anti-trust and FTC weren't being enforced. These triggers are inherent to a lesser or greater degree in all of us, every person alive. The imposition of personal cost through this and other psychological blindspots is how torturous and vexatious processes are created. Empathy and care are a two way street. It requires both entities to be acting in good faith through reflective appraisal. When this is distorted, it drives people crazy, and there is a critical saturation point where assumptions change because the environment has changed. If people show the indicators that they are acting in bad faith, others will treat them automatically as acting in bad faith. Eventually, the environment dictates that those people must prove they are acting in good faith (somehow) but proving this is quite hard. The environment switches from innocent benefit of the doubt to, guilty until proven innocent. These erosions of the social contract while subtle, dictate social behavior. Can you imagine a world where something bad happens to you, and everyone just turns their backs, or prevents you from helping yourself? Its the slipperly slope of society failing back to violence, few today commenting on things like this have actually read the material published by the greats on the social contract and don't know how society arose from the chaos of violence.
• mac-attack 1y ago
  With all due respect, I don't think customer service interaction are a meaningful rebuttal when discussing the decline in social relations, empathy and care. The former is an admittedly frustrating aspect in our transactional relationships with companies, while the others are the foundations of a functioning society throughout our civilization. Conflating business interactions with society needs is a familiar trope on HN IMO
  • reaperducer 1y ago
    I don't think customer service interaction are a meaningful rebuttal when discussing the decline in social relations, empathy and care. Often you give what you get. If you're nice to the customer service people on the phone, frequently they loosen up and are nice right back at you. Some kind of crazy "human" thing, I guess.
  • perching_aix 1y ago
    I literally led with a noncommercial example.
• MarcelOlsz 1y ago
  You forgot one key thing: I don't want to talk to an AI.
• passwordoops 1y ago
  Counter-counter : there is nothing as intellectually miserable and antisocial as large corporations and institutions replacing Helpdesks with draconian automated systems. Also, try to come up with a less esoteric example than Discord Help channels. In fact, this is the issue with most defenses of LLMs. The benefits are so niche, or minor, that the example itself shows why they are not worth the money being poured in
  • perching_aix 1y ago
    > there is nothing as intellectually miserable and antisocial as large corporations and institutions replacing Helpdesks with (...) automated systems Should be fairly obvious, but I disagree. Also I think you mean asocial, not antisocial. What's uniquely draconian about automated systems though? They're even susceptible to the same social engineering attacks humans are (it's just referred to as jailbreaking instead). > Also, try to come up with a less esoteric example than Discord Help channels. No. > The benefits are so niche, or minor, that the example itself shows why they are not worth the money being poured in Great. This is already significantly more intellectually honest than the entire blogpost.
• deleted 1y ago
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• raxxorraxor 1y ago
  Better yet, don't use Discord to build a community because if you don't do anything else, your knowledgebase will be lacking, which hinders adaption of your project. As a dev I have to be already quite desperate if I engage with a chat bot. Discord is better suited for developers working together, not for publishing the results to an audience.