5 ms·

> Us having to specify things that we would never specify when talking to a human. The first time I read that question I got confused: what kind of question is

• Gabrys1 9mo ago
  I would say, the proper response to this question is not "walk, blablablah" but rather "What do you mean? You need to drive your car to have it washed. Did I miss anything?"
  • steveBK123 9mo ago
    Yes, this is what irks me about all the chatbots, and the chat interface as a whole. It is a chat-like UX without a chat-like experience. Like you are talking to a loquacious autist about their favorite topic every time. Just ask me a clarifying question before going into your huge pitch. Chats are a back & forth. You don’t need to give me a response 10x longer than my initial question. Etc
    • WarmWash 9mo ago
      I think for "GPT-4o is my life partner" reasons, labs are a little bit icey about making the models overly human.
      • steveBK123 9mo ago
        Doubt. The labs are afraid of users becoming too hooked on their products? lol…
        • WarmWash 9mo ago
          People offing themselves because their lover convinced them it's time is absolutely not worth the extra addiction potential. We even witnessed this happen with OAI. It's a fast track to public disdain and heavy handed government regulation.
          • mountainb 9mo ago
            Regulation would be preferable for OpenAI to the tort lawyers. In general the LLM companies should want regulation because the alternative is tort, product liability tort, and contract law. There is no way without the protections that could be afforded by regulation to offer such wide-ranging uses of the product without also accepting significant liability. If the range of "foreseeable misuse" is very broad and deep, so is the possible liability. If your marketing says that the bot is your lawyer, doctor, therapist, and spouse in one package, how is one to say that the company can escape all the comprehensive duties that attach to those social roles. Courts will weigh the tiny and inconspicuous disclaimers against the very large and loud marketing claims. The companies could protect themselves in ways not unlike the ways in which the banking industry protects itself by replacing generic duties with ones defined by statute and regulation. Unless that happens, lawyers will loot the shareholders.
            • steveBK123 9mo ago
              It’s funny seeing you frame regulation as needed to protect trillion dollar monopolies from consumers and not the other way around.
              • mountainb 8mo ago
                Yes because that is how regulations really work and what the purpose is. In practice all companies both tiny and massive do everything that they can to use the state to quash competition and to reduce the risks of litigation. Software in general has been subject to light touches in part because most of the damage that software can really cause is economic and not personal injury. The lines blur when the companies release products that cause mental injuries to users that courts interpret as physical injuries; or if the software reasonably contributes to someone e.g. going crazy and killing another person. No one would seriously think of holding Microsoft liable if a kidnapper uses Word to draft a ransom note. But if CoPilot tells you to microwave a baby and you do it, many judges will want to take a close look at the operation of that software service irrespective of voluminous contract disclaimers. The only way the Microsofts of the world can escape that type of liability is with comprehensive regulation.
    • idiotsecant 9mo ago
      >You don’t need to give me a response 10x longer than my initial question. Except, of course, when that is exactly what the user wants.
      • steveBK123 9mo ago
        To me that’s not a chat interface, that’s a search interface. Chat is a back & forth. Search is a one-shot.
    • nakedneuron 9mo ago
      This. Nailed it.
    • mikkupikku 9mo ago
      > Like you are talking to a loquacious autist about their favorite topic every time That's the best part.
      • steveBK123 9mo ago
        People need to touch grass
        • mikkupikku 9mo ago
          People need to smoke grass and chill out.
    • ssl-3 9mo ago
      With ChatGPT, at least, you can tell the bot to work that way using [persistent] Custom Instructions, if that's what you want. These aren't obeyed perfectly (none of the instructions are, AFAICT), but they do influence behavior. A person can even hammer out an unstructured list of behavioral gripes, tell the bot to organize them into instructional prose, have it ask clarifying questions and revise based on answers, and produce directions for integrating them as Custom Instructions. From then on, it will invisibly read these instructions into context at the beginning of each new chat. Mold it and steer it to be how you want it to be. (My own bot tends to be very dry, terse, non-presumptuous, pragmatic, and profane. It's been years now since it has uttered an affirmation like "That's a great idea!" or "Wow! My circuits are positively buzzing with the genius I'm seeing here!" or produced a tangential dissertation in response to a simple question. But sometimes it does come back with functional questions, or phrasing like "That shit will never work. Here's why.")
• baxtr 9mo ago
  That’s why I don’t understand why LLMs don’t ask clarifying questions more often. In a real human to human conversation, you wouldn’t simply blurt out the first thing that comes to mind. Instead, you’d ask questions.
  • MaybiusStrip 9mo ago
    This is a great point, because when you ask it (Claude) if it has any questions, it often turns out it has lots of good ones! But it doesn't ask them unless you ask.
    • djmips 9mo ago
      you can get it to change by putting instructions to ask questions in the system prompt but I found it annoying at a while
    • YeGoblynQueenne 9mo ago
      That's because it doesn't really have any questions until you ask it whether it does.
      • datsci_est_2015 9mo ago
        This is the most important comment in this entire thread IMO, and it’s a bit buried. This is the fundamental limitation with generative AI. It only generates, it does not ponder.
        • spogbiper 9mo ago
          what is the difference between "ponder" and "generate"? the number of iterations?
          • datsci_est_2015 9mo ago
            Probably the lack of external stimuli. Generative AI only continues generating when prompted. You can play games with agents and feedback loops but the fundamental unit of generative AI is prompt-based. That doesn’t seem, to me, to be a sufficient model for intelligence that would be capable of “pondering”. My take is that an artificial model of true intelligence will only be achieved through emergent complexity, not through Frankenstein algorithms and heuristics built on generative AI. Generative AI does itself have emergent complexity, but I’m bearish that if we would even hook it up to a full human sensory input network it would be anything more than a 21st century reverse mechanical Turk. Edit: tl;dr Emergent complexity is a necessary but insufficient criteria for intelligence
• dannersy 9mo ago
  Whether you view the question as nonsensical, the most simple example of a riddle, or even an intentional "gotcha" doesn't really matter. The point is that people are asking the LLMs very complex questions where the details are buried even more than this simple example. The answers they get could be completely incorrect, flawed approaches/solutions/designs, or just mildly misguided advice. People are then taking this output and citing it as proof or even objectively correct. I think there are ton of reasons this could be but a particularly destructive reason is that responses are designed to be convincing. You _could_ say humans output similar answers to questions, but I think that is being intellectually dishonest. Context, experience, observation, objectivity, and actual intelligence is clearly important and not something the LLM has. It is increasingly frustrating to me why we cannot just use these tools for what they are good for. We have, yet again, allowed big tech to go balls deep into ham-fisting this technology irresponsibly into every facet of our lives the name of capital. Let us not even go into the finances of this shitshow.
  • Jweb_Guru 9mo ago
    Yeah people are always like "these are just trick questions!" as though the correct mode of use for an LLM is quizzing it on things where the answer is already available. Where LLMs have the greatest potential to steer you wrong is when you ask something where the answer is not obvious, the question might be ill-formed, or the user is incorrectly convinced that something should be possible (or easy) when it isn't. Such cases have a lot more in common with these "nonsensical riddles" than they do with any possible frontier benchmark. This is especially obvious when viewing the reasoning trace for models like Claude, which often spends a lot of time speculating about the user's "hints" and trying to parse out the intent of the user in asking the question. Essentially, the model I use for LLMs these days is to treat them as very good "test takers" which have limited open book access to a large swathe of the internet. They are trying to ace the test by any means necessary and love to take shortcuts to get there that don't require actual "reasoning" (which burns tokens and increases the context window, decreasing accuracy overall). For example, when asked to read a full paper, focusing on the implications for some particular problem, Claude agents will try to cheat by skimming until they get to a section that feels relevant, then searching directly for some words they read in that section. They will do this even if told explicitly that they must read the whole paper. I assume this is because the vast majority of the time, for the kinds of questions that they are trained on, this sort of behavior maximizes their reward function (though I'm sure I'm getting lots of details wrong about the way frontier models are trained, I find it very unlikely that the kinds of prompts that these agents get very closely resemble data found in the wild on the internet pre-LLMs).
• roysting 8mo ago
  This is a topic that I’ve always found rather curious, especially among this kind of tech/coding community that really should be more attuned to the necessity of specificity and accuracy. There seems to be a base set of assumptions that are intrinsic to and a component of ethnicities and cultures, the things one can assume one “wouldn’t never specify when talking to a human [of one’s own ethnicity and culture].” It’s similar to the challenge that foreigners have with cultural references and idioms and figurative speech a culture has a mental model of. In this case, I think what is missing are a set of assumptions based on logic, e.g., when stating that someone wants to do something, it assumes that all required necessary components will be available, accompany the subject, etc. I see this example as really not all that different than a meme that was common among I think the 80s and 90s, that people would forget buying batteries for Christmas toys even though it was clear they would be needed for an electronic toy. People failed that basic test too, and those were humans. It is odd how people are reacting to AI not being able to do these kinds of trick questions, while if you posted something similar about how you tricked some foreigners you’d be called racist, or people would laugh if it was some kind of new-guy hazing. AI is from a different culture and has just arrived here. Maybe we’re should be more generous and humane… most people are not humane though, especially the ones who insist they are. Frankly, I’m not sure it bodes well for if aliens ever arrive on Earth, how people would respond; and AI is arguably only marginally different than humans, something an alien life that could make it to Earth surely would not be.
  • hellotomyrars 8mo ago
    AI isn’t “from a different culture”. It doesn’t have culture. Any culture it does have is what it has sucked up from its training data and set in its weights. There is no need to be “humane” to AI because it possess no humanity. It has no personhood at all. It can’t feel. You can’t be inhumane to something that is literally incapable of feeling. A blade of grass has more humanity and is more deserving of respect than anything being referred to as AI does. Aliens might not be received well but it’s going to depend a lot on how they show up. AI is a “revolution” where the promise is that nobody will have to do meaningless work anymore ( I guess). The only problem is right now basically everyone has to do work meaningful or “meaningless” because the dominant thinking requires it for human survival. Weird how most people aren’t happy for the thing that is pitched to take away the meager scraps they get under the current regime.